


Away on the Other Side

by phyripo



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe - Stranger Things Fusion, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Mostly Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-13
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-02-10 08:19:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12907941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phyripo/pseuds/phyripo
Summary: A boy disappears a fortnight before Christmas and a strange child emerges from the woods. The small, sleepy Australian town of Watunga is turned upside down, shaken up by noises from the mountains, secrets in the forest and reflections of somewhere else. In the midst of it all, friendships form and change.Nothing will be the same.





	1. December 12 (prologue)

**Author's Note:**

> Yes indeed I said upside down in the summary on purpose :P
> 
> Alright! I had this idea about a Stranger Things fusion with the micronations last year March, and had the plot written out forever, but now it's finally being worked out. The chapter lengths vary a bit, since on some days, more things happen - especially seeing as the kids still have to go to school in the beginning.
> 
> Much like Stranger Things is set in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, this fic is set in the fictional town of Watunga, New South Wales. It is based on a real town, at least the street plan. Unlike Stranger Things, however, this does take place in the modern day. The story is similar but definitely different! There are some coincidental similarities with Stranger Things 2, but yeah I had this plot long before that came out :')
> 
> The title is from Moonlight Shadow by Mike Oldfield, which is actually a pretty fitting song...
> 
> FEATURING  
> Sealand - Peter Oxenstierna  
> Ladonia - Lars Oxenstierna  
> Wy - Ashleigh Clarke  
> TRNC - Refik Adnan  
> Kugelmugel - X/Alex  
> Hutt River - Joshua Clarke  
> Seborga - Marcello Vargas  
> Molossia - Liam Jones  
> Australia - David Clarke  
> New Zealand - Riley Greenwood  
> Seychelles - Angélique Verlaque  
> (other people will be listed at the end of the chapter where they appear)

There is a noise coming from the mountains. It’s not an unfamiliar noise, but it’s still jarring enough that all four of them snap their heads up.

“We really ought to go investigate that,” Peter says, for what Refik thinks must be the hundredth time this day alone, and they’ve only just got out here after school. It’s one of the last days before the summer holidays, and all of them are in a holiday mood already. Peter swings down from the tree branch he was resting on, almost kicking his brother in the head, and walks a few metres in the direction of the noise.

“We ought to investigate your _face_ ,” Lars mutters angrily, throwing some sticks at him.

“You probably do have a point there,” Ashleigh says, her head popping out from between the leaves high up in the tree, brown hair catching on twigs and leaves.

“Thank you,” Lars replies, tipping an invisible hat to her. He receives the sticks thrown back at his head in thanks, which makes Ashleigh laugh from where she’s now hidden in the tree again. Refik smiles, then laughs too when Peter, as usual, tries to get him to help his cause by throwing dirt at Lars. He shakes his head, pushing his friend away.

When the rumbling noise has long since died off and the sun has sunk low enough that it’s nearly touching the mountaintops, the four of them decide it’s time to go home. Ashleigh asks Refik if he’s coming to hers for dinner, but he waves dismissively.

“Kostas is home early today, so I’ll be fine.” He is rather hungry by now and looks forward to finding out what his brother has cooked up. Kostas works long days, but he’s a good cook when he’s got the time.

She grins. “All right, well, remember to tell him you guys are still invited for Christmas, and you know Dave won’t take no for an answer.”

“I’ll remind him,” Refik promises, bowing slightly at the waist – Ashleigh had won the battle for leader of their forest kingdom today. She laughs, pushes at his shoulder, and they dash after the Oxenstierna brothers, who are already waiting by the dirt path with their bikes. Refik pulls his own from the undergrowth as well, while Ashleigh picks up her skateboard, tucks it under her arm, and sits down imperiously on the back of Peter’s bike. He doesn’t complain, just takes off as fast as he can.

Lars and Refik follow them quickly, racing down through the woods to where the actual road into the village of Watunga winds down. Peter barely slows at all before Ashleigh is jumping off his bike and onto her skateboard, and flies down the bitumen. The boys zoom after her.

Refik is the first to break off from their little group, yelling goodbye to his friends and taking a sharp right down to Saleyards Road, at the end of which his house is waiting. Without slowing down, he begins to round the corner onto the last, bumpy stretch of the road, lost in thoughts of dinner and the new books he can start reading at home.

His back wheel slips on some gravel on the outside of the turn. It flings out from underneath him. With a startled yelp, Refik puts a foot on the ground to steady himself, hopping when his bike slides out from underneath him and skids off the street. He catches his breath, then sighs.

“Great.” Jumping into the dry, brittle grass lining the bitumen, he hauls his bike up by the handlebars. He has dusted it off a little when he notices the top of his bell is missing. It must have flown off and into the trees. He sighs again, but parks his bike and walks into the shadow to look for it, pushing plants aside with one foot to see if he can spot the glint of metal somewhere. If he can’t find it, he’s sure Kostas will buy him a new one, but still.

Oh, there! Refik reaches for the silver flicker between the plants after giving the bush a kick to ensure there are no animals hiding in it that will bite or sting his hand.

There is a rumble, like the one that comes from the mountains, but much louder. Close enough to make the ground shudder a little. Refik jumps back up, startled. That has never happened before.

When the noise is gone, he leans down again, but the flicker is nowhere to be seen. He hums in confusion, scratches his head underneath his baseball cap. Reaching down again, he takes a step forward. It’s probably rolled away, he thinks, so he searches around a bit, kicking more bushes in his path until he spots the silver glint again. He smiles, stepping towards it.

“All right, there you—” His foot lands on nothing, and Refik pitches forward with a yell, arms flailing but failing to grab on to anything as he _falls_ , into a hole that has never been there, the ground opening up and the shadows rising to meet him.

There is a noise coming from the mountains.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ALSO FEATURING (which is to say he's mentioned)  
> Kostas Tophi - Cyprus


	2. December 13

Sometimes, Joshua really wishes he’d been an only child.

“Josh!” Ashleigh is yelling from somewhere. “Josh, hey, where is my bag!”

“Lower your voice! David’s sleeping.”

As she passes through the kitchen, she raises her eyebrows at him in a patently unimpressed expression that Joshua is afraid she’s actually copied from him.

“Like I’m gonna wake him. You know Dave can sleep through an earthquake after a night shift. Now have you seen my bag, yeah or nah?”

Joshua sighs, but gestures vaguely at the stairs, where he last saw his sister’s beat-up backpack. He doesn’t understand how she walks around with that thing all the time – it looks like it will fall apart any moment. But then, so do many of her trousers, and they seem to accumulate more rips and tears every single day, along with scrapes and bruises and dirt in her hair.

“Oh yeah! Found it!” she calls from the hall.

“Ssh!” It’s more for his own benefit than for his brother’s, if Joshua’s honest. David really _can_ sleep through anything, which is probably a direct result of Ashleigh _never lowering her voice_.

“I’m off to school!” she yells now, standing in the doorway where he would be perfectly able to understand her if she whispered. He really, really wishes he was an only child.

“Be careful,” he just says, because someone has to be the adult in this household, and David may be 33, but he barely qualifies for the role. Ashleigh just gives him another unimpressed stare in return, then speeds outside, screen door slamming in her wake. Joshua sighs.

He doesn’t have to go to work for a few hours yet, so he busies himself looking after his garden and doing some tidying in his bedroom. He looks through the notes he has left from his last year of high school, trying to decide what to do with them. Maybe they’ll be useful to Ashleigh in the long run... Oh, who is he kidding? Even if she stays at school through year 11 and 12, she’ll never take the same subjects he did if only for the principle of the thing.

Well, Joshua supposes he can use the papers to make a fire this winter then, when it won’t pose as much of a risk of causing a forest fire.

At eleven, he leaves the house and walks down Winton Street to the bakery where he works alongside his best friend, Marcello. It’s not far, but then nothing in Watunga is far – he even walked to school on the other side of town every day.

Marcello waves happily from behind the glass-case counter of the bakery when he enters. The air inside is pleasant, far cooler than the heat outside. The summer is at its height, and the valley that Watunga lies in gets very little rain this time of year. You never really get used to it.

Joshua sets to work. He likes the bakery. Some days, he think this is something he could do for the rest of his life, but the move to Canberra at the end of the summer to go to university there is a fait accompli by now, no backing down.

At about two, the time Marcello’s shift ends and he has disappeared into the back to tidy up a little, Joshua is jerked out of a concentrated attempt to stack the biscuits in an appealing, yet steady manner by the angry growl of a motorcycle reverberating through quiet Winton Street, practically rattling the windows of the bakery. Joshua grits his teeth. There is only one person in the village with such an annoying bike, and he’s been looking forward to never seeing him again.

Before he can call out to Marcello over the noise to make a remark about this, the growling stops, and just seconds later, Joshua’s least favourite _former_ classmate walks into the bakery, all sunglasses and leather jacket as if it isn’t five million degrees out there. A voice at the back of his mind that sounds like Marcello reminds Joshua that’s it’s the safe thing to do, wear a jacket on a motorcycle, but he ignores it.

“Liam,” he says instead, tightly.

“Fancy seeing you here, mate,” Liam replies, not taking his sunglasses off. “Thought you’d be busy protecting those flowers of yours from the sun, yeah?”

“How can I help you.”

A slow smirk curls around Liam’s lips, and he smoothes his dark hair back without hurry. It’s impossible to tell where he’s looking. God, Joshua wishes he could just punch those sunglasses off his bloody face.

“Let me look around.”

 “Sure,” Joshua says flatly, watching with wariness as Liam wanders around the bakery. Can he even see anything with those glasses on? He was always wearing them at school as well, no matter how often the teachers told him to take them off. He never wore his tie properly either, if at all. It bothered Joshua to no end. Marcello never seemed to mind so much.

“—ey! Hey, Joshua!”

“Stop – _that_ ,” Joshua snaps, slapping Liam’s clicking fingers out of his face. His hand is somehow cold. “I’m not a dog.”

Dark eyebrows appear from behind the sunglasses.

“Isn’t the customer king here?” Liam drawls. “Doesn’t look like it, mate. Maybe I should go somewhere else.”

And as much as Joshua dislikes Liam Jones, he’s still a customer – apparently – so he bites his lip.

“Of course. How can I help you?”

Liam wordlessly flings a packet of Christmas pastries on the counter. It almost flies off on the other side, but Joshua manages to catch it.

“Anything else I can get you?” Joshua asks, as he pointedly looks at the register instead of Liam. With a glance up, he adds, “ _Sir_?”

Liam’s upper lip twitches. “No, _sir_ ,” he mocks.

“I’m just doing my job.”

“Well, I’m just here to buy some fucking cookies, all right mate?” Liam snaps, pushing his hair back in an erratic movement. “Can’t wait for the summer to be over so all you goddamn idiots are gone.”

“I—” Joshua blinks. “You’re not leaving Watunga? What, are you going to work for your father? That’ll be four dollars.”

“It’s none of your fucking business what I’m going to do, Clarke!” He slams some coins down on the counter and grabs his pastries, then continues in a dangerously low growl, “At least I have a father, hm? How’s your brother?”

“You don’t have the _right_ —”

“All right, gents!” Marcello interrupts, putting a hand on Joshua’s shoulder. “It’s almost Christmas, and you never have to see each other again if you don’t want to, so why don’t we calm down? Hello, Liam.”

Joshua deflates, releasing the tight grip he didn’t realise he had on the register. He doesn’t understand how Marcello can just _not mind_ Liam, but Marcello never minds much. It’s probably why they’re friends.

“See, that’s not so hard, is it?” Marcello asks.

“Hm, yeah,” he replies, still looking at Liam, who is lingering for some reason, back turned. He doesn’t need change.

“Hey,” says Marcello, cocking his head in Liam’s direction when Joshua finally looks at him. “She’ll be right, Josh. See you tomorrow.”

Joshua smiles vaguely when Marcello leaves, followed closely by Liam. He frowns at that, but he knows with certainty his friend can’t be baited into a fight. He’ll be fine.

* * *

They’re watching a film during what’s supposed to be English class when the door to the classroom opens and the woman who runs the school’s visitors’ desk pokes her head in.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she says, “but I’d like to borrow Ashleigh Clarke and Peter and Lars Oxenstierna.”

The three of them glance at each other, then at Refik’s empty seat. He didn’t show up to school this morning and didn’t send a message either, which is very unlike him, but, they reckoned, maybe he’d fallen very ill and was sleeping or vomiting or something, and just couldn’t.

But, as they walk through the halls of the primary school to the visitors’ desk, Lars begins to worry.

“What if something is wrong with Refik?” Peter hisses behind him. He smiles a little despite his worry. Good to know they’re thinking the same thing.

“Why would they need to talk to us, then?” Ashleigh asks.

After that, Lars ignores his friends and nervously fidgets with the buttons of his shirt instead.

There are police. Ashleigh sucks in a shocked breath, all three of them stopping as one. The lady turns around, hands on her hips.

“What’s going on?” Peter asks. She sighs.

“Come on inside, it’ll be explained.”

They follow her warily to the a room behind the desk, where two police officers are waiting. One smiles at them while the door closes behind them, visitors’ desk lady leaving. He is holding a clipboard and pen at the ready. Lars and his friends sit down on a small couch when gestured towards it, all equally jittery.

“I’m sergeant Pham,” says the police officer who did not smile, “and this is constable Madsen. We heard that you are Refik Adnan’s best friends, is that right?”

All three of them nod meekly.

“Is he okay?” Peter asks.

“We don’t know,” Madsen replies. “Refik is missing. His brother said you were with him last night, yeah?”

They nod again, stunned into silence. Lars clenches his fingers in his trousers in shock.

“All right. When did you go home?”

“Uhm.” They shoot each other questioning glances – Peter and Lars’s dad makes them promise to be home when the sun touches the mountains, which is pretty flexible, and Ashleigh’s brothers really don’t care much when she comes home, so they hardly bother to check the time.

“Seven?” Peter eventually says. “Dad was waiting with dinner when we came home, right Lars?”

Lars nods. “Yeah, and Refik went home at the same time.”

“Did you see him arrive home?” Pham asks while Madsen makes some notes on his clipboard.

All three of them reply at the same time, talking about Saleyards Road and seeing him go in there but his house is all the way at the end and Kostas was home—

“All right! All right, children, have any of you heard from him after that? His brother told us he was home later than planned and sent him a message at eight that has not been received.”

“No, nothing,” Ashleigh says. She plucks at the edge of her skirt. “What if he got lost in the woods? Are you looking for him?”

“Of course we are,” Pham says, her expression neutral but her brown eyes soft. “We need to know where to look, that’s why it’s important we talk to you.”

“Will Ashleigh’s brother look for him too?” Peter asks. Ashleigh pushes at his arm, jostling Lars as well.

Madsen grins. “I don’t think we could stop sergeant Clarke if we wanted. He cares a lot about you kids.”

It’s always strange to hear David being referred to as ‘sergeant Clarke’ – he’s such an idiot that Lars sometimes forgets Ashleigh’s brother is a police officer at all, let alone one with an actual rank. He’s far cooler as a brother than Peter.

“Can _we_ search?” Peter then asks, and Lars perks up. That’s a great idea! “We know the woods very—”

“No,” Pham interrupts, not unkindly. “I don’t doubt you know the woods, but there is a method for these things.”

Madsen shoots them an apologetic look, but nods in agreement.

Although they protest – of course they do – they are herded back to class, as if they’ll manage to pay attention to the half-hearted last-week-of-school classes after _that_. To prevent their classmates from asking questions, Mr Honda has them all work in silence. Lars spends the entire lesson doodling on his lined paper, until the bell for end of day finally rings, and the three of them practically run outside.

Ashleigh hitches a ride on the back of Peter’s bike, not keen on skateboarding up the slight slope of King Street when they have such urgent news to discuss. They arrive at the Oxenstiernas’ in record time and hole up in the treehouse in the backyard.

“You know we have to look for him,” Peter starts when they’ve barely sat down. “We _have to_.”

“I don’t know, Peter,” Lars replies. He wrinkles his nose, thinking. “Of course I want to, but sergeant Pham was right, you know. There’s methods for that, and maybe we would... Disrupt evidence, or something like that. Besides, I’m not sure dad will let us go out.”

“Since when do we care about what dad says?”

“Guys,” Ashleigh interrupts them, “we can go to the woods now. No one said we weren’t allowed to do _that_.”

“Right!” Peter exclaims. “And if we happen to pass by Saleyards Road—”

“—no one can fault us for that,” Lars finishes thinkingly. Ashleigh cocks her head.

“What if he did go home but went back to the kingdom? If he forgot something?” she then suggests. “The police won’t look there, probably. No one knows where it is.”

The boys hum in agreement.

“Well, what are we waiting for!” she says, climbing to her feet. “Go change out of your school uniforms and we’ll meet by the museum, yeah?”

And because they’ve learnt to listen to Ashleigh – and really, because they want to – Lars and Peter rush to change, write a note to their dad, and race to the local museum, where she is already waiting, having stolen her brother Joshua’s bike. They’ll find out what happened to Refik. They will.

* * *

Joshua’s phone buzzes.

He sighs, hoping it’s Ashleigh letting him know when she’s going to be home so he knows when to start dinner. David told him that one of her small friends – the sensible one, he thinks – has gone missing, and Joshua can just _feel_ that she’s doing something reckless at this very moment. Probably bothering someone.

At the very least, it’s not him. The phone screen reads _Grandpa Vargas_. Marcello’s grandfather? He’s surprised the old man even knows how to text – Joshua only has this number in case of an emergency.

_Hello Joshua. Is marcello with you. He is not at home. Regards Marco vargas._

Joshua blinks.

_Hello Mr Vargas. Marcello isn’t with me; I haven’t seen him since two in the arvo. Did he leave a note?_

Grandpa Vargas is not always all there, he knows, so it doesn’t seem unlikely that he simply forgot Marcello was going somewhere. He usually leaves notes in addition to telling him for that reason.

While Mr Vargas types out an answer, Joshua decides to just start dinner. Ashleigh can re-heat her portion if she comes home late.

Finally, the indication that Marcello’s grandpa is typing disappears, and he replies, _No._

“All right,” Joshua says, rolling his eyes. Old people.

_I’m sure he’ll turn up. If he doesn’t, let me know._

After another small eternity, during which the water for the spaghetti starts to boil, Mr Vargas sends back an _Ok_.

Joshua sends Marcello himself a message, asking him where he is and saying that his grandpa is worried, but it is not received. He shrugs. Reception tend to be downright awful even less than a kilometre out of Watunga. Maybe Marcello is taking a girl from one of the nearby villages out or something like that. It happens.

Now, it’s time for spaghetti – original Vargas recipe.

* * *

The woods are as green as ever, the shadows lengthening as they search their undisturbed kingdom. The river rushes and the birds – sing; Lars thinks you’re supposed to call it singing.

Nothing, absolutely _nothing_ , is out of the ordinary, except for the fact that there’s only three of them.

“This is weird,” Peter is muttering, pushing aside bushes and kicking twigs while Ashleigh climbs into a tree, probably because she has no other ideas left. Lars himself is walking along the bank of the river, wondering.

What if something bad really did happen to Refik? There are all sorts of animals in the forest, in the mountains, and so much dangerous terrain. But, _no_ , he tells himself. Refik is smart, probably the smartest out of the four of them, although he’ll never admit that out loud. He’s fine.

“Guys?” Peter says, from somewhere between the trees. “Ashleigh, did you hear something?”

Lars and Ashleigh both clamber up to where he’s standing looking around.

“I heard something,” he clarifies, voice hushed.

“An animal something?” Lars asks, coming to stand on his brother’s right. Peter shrugs, scanning the forest. They form a triangle, backs to each other, so they have a complete view of their surroundings.

“I don’t see anything,” Ashleigh whispers.

“Me neither,” Peter replies. “Lars?”

There is something... _White_ between the bushes. It doesn’t look like an animal, and it doesn’t look like it’s moving, but Lars still gets the feeling it is watching him.

“Lars?”

He feels his friends turn to look at the bush he’s facing too. They flank him on either side and watch in silence when the bush begins to _move_. There is tension in their muscles – they’re ready to bolt in a millisecond, should it be necessary.

A small, pale shape unfolds itself from behind the bush; nearly white hair falling over trembling shoulders. Wide, frightened dark eyes. Lars releases his breath in a great sigh.

A child. It’s a _child_. About their own age, barefoot and dressed in some sort of white gown.

“What,” Peter says, “the bloody hell.”

* * *

When Ashleigh finally comes home, she doesn’t stop texting all through her microwaved dinner and barely speaks half a word to Joshua. She seems excited about something. Maybe there’s good news about her small sensible friend.

Joshua glances at his own phone with a sigh. If only the same could be said for Marcello.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ALSO FEATURING  
> sergeant Pham - Vietnam  
> constable Madsen - Denmark  
> Mr Honda - Japan  
> Marco Vargas - Roman Empire


	3. December 14

“No news is good news, Josh,” David says through a mouthful of bread. “If you’re right and he had a date, maybe he spent the night, yeah? Maybe he’s still sleeping.”

“It’s just not _like_ Marcello,” Joshua replies, slightly agitated by how little his brother seems to care. “And Ashleigh’s friend, isn’t he still missing? There could be someone—”

“What, kidnapping teenagers?” David sighs, pushing his dark brown hair away from his forehead. He looks tired despite having just woken up. “Look, I get that you’re worried, but I— What do you want me to do, anyway?”

Joshua leans forward over the kitchen table. “Whatever you do when someone goes missing! Look for clues? At least see if he took something from his house.”

“Hey.” David plants both of his hands on the table and stands up. “Why don’t you go do that, yeah? And if you’re still worried later, if he doesn’t show up, take Mr Vargas and come to the police station. It’s already hectic, with the commander on holiday and Refik missing. But Josh, this is Watunga. The worst thing that happens here is Chairak setting fire to his bloody trousers again.”

Dejected, Joshua agrees to that plan. He leaves David to his lunch-cum-breakfast in the sunny kitchen and bikes to Marcello’s house on the other side of the village. His bike is dirty, but he’s not in the mood to be angry with Ashleigh for stealing it. Maybe later. Not that it ever does any good.

Mr Vargas opens the door quickly. He looks tired. Joshua has always thought he must have been a very handsome man back in the day, but there’s only glimpses of it now. His brown eyes do still – always – have a spark in them that Marcello also has. Marcello himself has called it the Vargas sparkle and claims girls love it.

“Oh, hello Joshua, how nice to see you.” He gestures him into the hall of the small house. “Marcello is still not home. Have you heard from him? Do you want something to drink?”

“That’d be nice, thanks. I haven’t heard from Marcello.” Joshua trails after the old man to the kitchen. “You’re sure he didn’t say where he was going? Left a message?”

“I’m quite certain, Joshua.” Mr Vargas hands him a glass of orange juice. “And he took the car, but nothing else.”

Taking a sip, Joshua grimaces – he only just brushed his teeth, and the drink leaves a foul taste in his mouth. He puts it down and coughs to cover up the face he’s making.

“He has not been online since last night,” Mr Vargas adds, surprising Joshua once again with his technological prowess. “I remember him talking to a boy outside before he left. He must have been in your year at school.”

“What? What did he look like?”

“Oh, he was dressed far too warmly for the weather,” Mr Vargas says, his tone almost admonishing. The Vargas family does tend to be fashion-conscious – it’s the Italian roots, Joshua thinks. “A leather jacket!”

 _Fuck_. “Did he have dark hair? Like—” Joshua pushes his hair back from his face in an attempt to imitate that weird pompadour Liam Jones calls a haircut.

“Yes, exactly. He would have been quite fashionable in my day, mind. Is he a friend?” Mr Vargas smiles.

“Yeah, yeah sure,” Joshua replies distractedly. What the _hell_ did Liam want with Marcello? “Mr Vargas, I’m very sorry, but I have to go, all right? I’ll let you know if I hear anything from Marcello.”

And though the old man is mumbling something about his orange juice, Joshua takes off. He _has_ to find Liam, because if he’s the last person to have spoken to Marcello yesterday—

He races to the local pub, not knowing if Liam still works there at all – the thought of the bloke as a waiter is downright laughable – and if he does, if he’s at work so early in the afternoon, but he knows he guessed right when he sees the obnoxious green-black motorcycle in the small car park out front. Good. He has no idea where he lives.

Joshua practically throws his bicycle down and pushes the door of the pub open brusquely. Something about Liam just makes him _aggressive_. It’s uncharacteristic and he isn’t particularly proud of it, but when he sees him calmly cleaning glasses behind the bar after his eyes have adjusted to the dim light, he marches over and slams his hands down on the dark, polished wood.

“ _Liam_.”

He glances up briefly, then says, “You’re not supposed to be here. We don’t serve babies, mate.”

“I’m _seventeen_ — I don’t want a bloody drink, Liam. I want to know where Marcello is.”

He puts the glass down and leans forward on both hands. For once without both the sunglasses and the leather jacket, his face looks almost naked. His eyes are cold, and dark. Joshua had the notion they were blue all this time.

“And why would I know that?”

“You talked to him yesterday.”

Liam visibly bites the inside of his cheek. “Yeah, so? I _talked_ to you to, if you recall.”

“ _So_ —” Joshua takes a very deep breath that burns down his throat with the chemical scent of dish soap. “No one has heard from him since.”

“How is that my fucking problem?” Liam is leaning over the bar now, looking as if he’d very much like to grab Joshua and strangle him. Some strands of his hair have come loose from his ridiculous but perfectly styled semi-pompadour and fallen over an eyebrow. Joshua swallows. Tries not to move. “Just because you can’t find your boyfriend—”

“He’s not my boyfriend!”

“Right, right.” Liam’s upper lip twitches. “All the better for him, really.”

“Oh, screw you, Liam,” Joshua spits, then turns on his heel. Why is it so _easy_ for the guy to rile him up?

“Jesus Christ,” he hears Liam mutter just before he closes the door to the dim pub behind himself. It is opened again a second later, and Liam calls, “Mate, are you fucking serious? Marcello is missing and you think _I_ did something to him? I was just _talking_ to him yesterday.”

“Why?” Joshua asks through clenched teeth.

“Why? Because he’s actually a decent person, holy fuck. What is your problem? I’m not allowed to talk to people now?”

“Leave me alone,” Joshua says, suddenly tired of the discussion. What was he thinking, coming here? He needs to go to the police.

“ _Me_ , leave _you_ alone? Coming from the bloke who just turned up at my job and accused me of – of kidnapping someone, that’s rich. That’s fucking rich, Joshua.”

“Leave me the _fuck_ alone, all right?”

Liam huffs. “Oh, you’re swearing now. Growing up, are we, mate?”

“I am not your fucking _mate_!” Joshua turns around and, without even thinking about it, takes a swing at Liam. He only hits him in the shoulder, but it’s enough to wipe the obnoxiously self-satisfied look off his face. It’s replaced by astonishment for just a second before Liam’s features morph into unmistakeable fury, and then he’s on Joshua.

They grapple with each other furiously – Liam lands some blows on Joshua’s face, but Joshua is mildly pleased through the haze of anger and pain that he manages to punch Liam a couple of times as well.

He tastes copper and his back hits the brick wall of the pub when he stumbles, and Liam’s hazel eyes are blazing now and he’s raising his arm and Joshua may be as well – and then there’s a shape between them, tall and decidedly _blue_. And... Angry.

“Josh, what the hell is going on here?”

Oh. David.

 _Shit_.

“Well?”

He shrugs, looking at his shoes. Something is red in the corner of his eye.

“And you,” David continues. “Liam, isn’t it? Jones?”

“Yeah,” Liam says, sounding like it’s costing him a massive amount of effort. Ha, he’s probably been caught fighting before. Joshua huffs a vindictive laugh that hurts his cheek. That’s gonna bruise.

“There’s nothing to laugh about here, Josh!” David puts a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Both of you are coming with me to the station to cool the hell off.”

“But Marcello—”

“No buts, Josh, I swear to god.” He tugs them both to his car, grumbling to himself, and shoves them unceremoniously in the backseat.

“Jesus, look what you’ve got us into,” Liam hisses. Joshua feels his hackles rise.

“How is this my fault? You’re the one who—”

“No talking,” David interrupts loudly, so they settle for glaring at each other while they drive down Winton Street. Joshua’s head is pounding and he can feel that his nose has started to bleed, warm on his upper lip, but at least Liam’s face is sporting a few bruises and scrapes. Much as he’s never been one for fighting, it fills him with a sort of twisted pride to know he did that.

David is quiet when he leads them into Watunga’s tiny police station, a building with one storey that looks like it had its best time forty years ago. The silence unnerves Joshua; his brother is boisterous and loud nearly all the time. His quiet moments are few and far between, and almost always mean that something is wrong.

They leave Liam sitting at someone’s desk, and Joshua ends up in an office – maybe David’s own. He’s climbed in rank since Joshua last visited him at work. It used to be a regular occurrence, but at some point, it stopped being cool. The room is small, and although there is a fan adorned with silver tinsel blowing full force on the desk, it’s still stifling. Joshua can practically feel himself starting to stick to the chair.

“Josh, really, what was that about? You’re not a fighter.” David sighs and, leaning against the desk, continues with a faint smile. “You take after dad in that way.”

Joshua lowers his gaze, looking at his scuffed knuckles. He folds his fingers together in his lap.

“Who started it?” David asks when he doesn’t reply.

“I did, I think,” he mumbles. “I just – I’m worried about Marcello and Mr Vargas said Liam talked to him yesterday so—”

“So you went up to him and punched him?”

“That’s not what _happened_ , David.” Joshua grits his teeth. It hurts.

“I want you to apologise.”

His head snaps up, which causes a stab of pain to shoot through his face. “You can’t be serious! You can’t tell me what to—”

“I can and I _will_.” David raises his voice slightly. “I’m a police officer, and I’m still your bloody _guardian_ , Josh. You don’t have to mean it, but at least pretend to. If he’s feeling petty, you know that father of his has the resources to take this somewhere official. The last thing I want is for you to be unable to go to uni because some dumb feud is haunting you, all right?”

 _Would that be so bad_ , Joshua wants to ask, but instead he clenches his fingers on the arm rests of his chair and nods. It hurts that his brother has to reprimand him, when he’s practically the one always looking after Ashleigh. He knows David doesn’t mean for him to be, that he just has a lot of work to do, but that doesn’t mean it never stings. If – when – he does go to Canberra, he wonders how they’ll manage.

With nothing left to say, he goes back out, and Liam looks... Odd. Still with an apron tied around his waist, and in short sleeves – Joshua can’t recall ever having seen him in a plain t-shirt before – and with his hair falling over his forehead messily while he presses an icepack against his temple. Where did he get that? Joshua would like one of those. His cheek hurts like hell.

“Liam.” He sits down across from him at the end of the desk. Liam looks at him with one eye.

“Joshua.”

“I... Listen, I’m – sorry. I’m worried about Marcello.”

Liam huffs, then grimaces in pain. “Yeah, really sounds like you mean it, mate.” He scoots forward in his chair until his knees almost press against Joshua’s, leans forward. “He told me where he was going, you know. Marcello. Had a date with a girl from Mate Street.”

“What? Why didn’t you say—” Joshua falls silent when Liam raises his eyebrows at him incredulously. “Right. All right.”

“Don’t say I never did anything for you,” Liam says, then stands up, pushes the icepack into Joshua’s hands, and walks off. Joshua stares after him.

All right, then.

* * *

If anyone notices how jittery the three of them are, Lars hopes they will attribute it to the fact that their best friend is missing, and not to the fact that there is a _child who emerged from the woods_ hidden in his and Peter’s tree house. At least, he hopes there still is. He isn’t sure they were clear enough about the necessity to _stay put_.

It seemed like the logical thing to do, when the child in question was so clearly terrified and vehemently opposed to asking for help from Lars’s dad or Ashleigh’s brother. And they couldn’t just pretend it didn’t happen. That would be cruel.

Mr Honda keeps them busy even though tomorrow is the last day of school. Lars, Peter, Ashleigh and Refik will finally be entering the last year of primary school after the summer. He wonders how old their unexpected guest is. And if, maybe, the mysterious appearance has something to do with Refik’s _disappearance_. It just seems to be too big a thing to be coincidental somehow. Nothing ever happens in Watunga, and now everything seems to be happening at once.

Once again, they race home after school. Peter rushes through the house first, and then there is a startled yelp from the backyard. Ashleigh and Lars share a look and dash after him.

 _Oh_.

The child from the woods, still barefoot and in the white gown, is balancing on the railing of the tree house, seemingly not having noticed them yet.

“That doesn’t seem safe,” Ashleigh whispers.

“No shit, Sherlock,” says Peter. Ashleigh punches him in the arm. Lars takes a step towards the large oak tree holding the tree house. Dad built the hut, years ago when Lars and Peter first came to live with him, and there have been several additions made over time, some more successful than others. This summer’s project is trying to get electricity up there without ugly cables running through the garden. Lars has been working on an idea about solar panels with dad, and Peter is excited about the opportunity to climb on the tree house’s roof.

“Hey,” he says. And, when there is no reaction, he clears his throat and tries again, slightly louder. “Oi! Uhm, up there!”

Startled, dark eyes snap to him, and Lars sees it happen before it actually does.

The child falls, a flurry of white. Without thinking about it, he rushes forward to try and – what even? He can hardly catch—

“ _What_?” he whispers, coming to an abrupt halt. His arms drop uselessly beside his body. He can only gape, staring up.

“Holy shit,” Ashleigh mutters behind him.

The child, unheeding, _floats_ serenely down to the ground and lands right in front of Lars, expression questioning, as if not understanding why they are all staring.

“Did you see that?” Peter exclaims.

“No, Peter, we missed it,” Ashleigh snaps. “And shut up, you’re startling…” She falters. They never did get a name yesterday, too caught up with sneaking around.

“What’s your name?” Lars asks.

A tilt of the head, then, softly, “X.”

“X? That’s your name? Is it short for something?” Lars fidgets under the intense gaze. Ashleigh and Peter have walked up next to him.

“No.”

“Just X?”

“That sounds like she’s some experiment or something,” Peter hisses, unsubtly. X’s eyes narrow.

“No.”

“No what? You’re not an experiment?”

“ _She_.”

“‘She’? Oh! You’re not a girl?” Peter asks. “All right, sorry, you’re a boy? He?”

“No.”

“No?”

Ashleigh says, “How about _they_ , is that all right? My brother’s best friend is not a boy or a girl and we call them they.”

X looks at her for a moment, then nods.

“Well,” says Peter, “all right, but I think we’re still missing the point, which is that they just _stopped_ in mid-air—“

“You know,” Ashleigh interrupts, and Lars has to smile at both the familiarity of it and the way X’s eyes flick from one person to the next as they speak, “Pete was right, X is not really a name. Do you like being X?”

“No,” they say decisively. Peter grumbles, but Ashleigh and Lars ignore him with practiced ease.

“Then,” Lars starts, thinking, “how about we call you… Alex?”

“Alex,” they repeat. “Alex.” A smile breaks out on the pale face. “Yes.”

“Can we _please_ go back to the superpowers?” Peter asks, then swears when they hear the screen door bang open and their dad calls out for them. He’s home early. Ashleigh tugs at Peter’s sleeve.

“Come on, Lars can get them back in the tree house, Pete. We should probably get our uniforms off anyway, yeah?”

And though he doesn’t stop grumbling, Peter lets himself be tugged to the house, leaving Lars with _Alex_.

“Are you sure you don’t want us to tell our dad about you?” he asks. “He’d help you, I’m sure.”

“No.” That seems to be their favourite word. The answer sounds very decisive, so Lars decides to leave it be, at least for now.

The two of them climb back up to the tree house. Lars pulls the ladder up for good measure. Then, he gets a little nervous, because Peter was right; Alex _does_ have some sort of... Powers. Who’s to say they won’t use those against him, if he startles them? Who knows what they can do? He tugs at his collar, trying to loosen it in the face of the afternoon heat.

“Are you afraid?” Alex asks, cocking their head. They sound both curious and slightly derogatory. Is that how they’re used to hearing that question asked? Lars suddenly feels sad for them. There must be a reason, after all, that they’re so afraid of grownups. Why they were barefoot in the forest, and wearing that _thing_.

“I am not afraid,” he tells Alex, not knowing if it’s really true. “Are you afraid?” He tries to sound genuine and trustworthy.

Alex sits down on the thin mattress in the corner of the tree house. Their long, pale hair actually touches the sheet pulled over it, it’s so long.

“I am not afraid,” they echo. Maybe they’re both lying.

“Hey,” Lars says, squatting in front of them. They hug their chafed knees to their chest. “Do you want clean clothes? All of us keep some things around here, I think you’d fit most of them.”

Lars has just hit a growth spurt himself and more and more clothes that can’t be given away to charity are being delegated to the tree house to act as whatever they happen to need at the time. He is growing taller than his brother. Peter, who is seven months older than him, is of course furious about this. It’s hilarious.

“You should wash too, I guess, but if dad’s home, I’m not sure how we’d do that,” he babbles on when Alex just stares at him. Their eyes are an odd colour, dark brown bordering on violet. Lars scratches at his nose and stands up to go find the box of clothes they have lying around. He’ll let Alex choose. They’ll probably like that.

While Alex rifles through the clothes, he sprints inside to his bedroom and changes out of his school uniform, hanging it neatly over his chair for the last day of school tomorrow. He sneaks some biscuits and an orange out of the pantry for Alex, and is informed by his dad that Peter and Ashleigh have gone to the Clarkes’ to get something. When he checks his phone, he finds a message from Ashleigh explaining they’ve gone to get her bike – or her brother’s bike, as it were – and they’ll be right back.

In the tree house, he finds Alex sitting in a puddle of clothing and wearing an odd combination of purple dungarees – Ashleigh’s – a yellow shirt – Peter’s – and beat-up runners – Lars’s. They look happy about it, so he decides not to comment. Instead, he gives them the food and offers to braid their hair, which he used to do for Ashleigh until they both decided they were too old for it. They look up at him curiously but say yes.

And so he divides the mass of pale blond in two and sets to braiding best he can. Alex practically inhales the food. How long have they not eaten?

He’s almost done when Alex reaches for a red jumper discarded on the floor and holds it out in front of them.

“I think it’s a bit too warm to wear that,” Lars says absentmindedly, fiddling to get an elastic around the end of one of the braids. He could swear Alex huffs, and it makes him smile.

“Somewhere else,” they say softly. They turn their head to look at him and shake the jumper a little.

“Somewhere else?” Lars leans over their shoulder. That jumper belongs to Refik. He reaches out to touch it, and Alex nods. “Refik? Our friend? He’s somewhere else, yes. He’s been missing since Tuesday evening.”

“Tuesday?”

“Uhm. Yes, the day before yesterday. Today is Thursday.”

“Thursday,” they echo.

“Yes. Do you... Have you seen Refik? In the woods?”

“Somewhere else,” they say again, and then make a complicated gesture, as if drawing in the air in front of them.

“Did you see him somewhere else?” Lars asks, and when they nod, he presses his lips together, furrowing his brow. “Can, uhm, can you tell us where? Can you show us?”

They turn to him fully, mirroring him on their knees, Refik’s jumper clutched to their chest. Their pointy knees poke through the fabric of the dungarees – Ashleigh can’t wear trousers without falling holes in them. She can’t really wear anything without falling holes in it, Lars reckons. It’s a miracle her school uniform has survived the school year.

“Yes,” they say solemnly. “I can show you.”

Lars wants to say that that’s great and they should wait for Ashleigh and Peter to return and then go, but Alex is standing up and stepping out of the tree house _without using the ladder_ , so he can only hurry after them and hope that no one notices the two of them sneaking between the houses from King Street to Church Lane and further west.

He rather forgets to send his friends a message in the rush.

* * *

The front door slams.

Is Ashleigh back? She just left. Joshua looks up when she walks into the backyard, followed by Peter Oxenstierna, with whom she just went away – she stole David’s bike for a change. It was far too big for her, which made Joshua laugh.

“Back already?” he asks, lowering his sunglasses.

“Lars is gone,” Peter replies.

Joshua blanches. Not _another_ person? Peter seems unconcerned about his brother’s whereabouts, though, just vaguely angry, so Joshua smiles a little at his sister’s friend and tries to read his book. His face still hurts, but it’s a dull ache now. That’s probably good, he reckons. He’s only hurt it before during gym class at school, so he doesn’t have a good frame for comparison, but he thinks it is good.

The doorbell rings, and Ashleigh and Peter both rush through the house to the front door again. Probably Lars Oxenstierna.

“ _Josh_!” Ashleigh bellows, three seconds later, and he almost drops his book. So much volume in such a small girl. It always astonishes and deafens him again. “It’s for you!”

He sighs and puts the book away. He couldn’t concentrate anyhow, kept checking his phone to see if maybe Marcello would send anything. Calling out to his sister that he’s coming, he saunters to the hall.

At the front door, looking decidedly uncomfortable in the presence of two thirteen-year-olds and with a purpling bruise on his temple that his sunnies can only half hide, is Liam Jones. Joshua stops in his tracks at the end of the hall, ignoring the suspicious glances between them and their matching injuries.

“Uhm,” he says. Liam runs a hand over his hair.

“I gotta talk to you,” he says.

“Does that mean more fighting?” asks Ashleigh, sounding almost excited, and Liam actually flushes, Joshua can’t help but note before he manages to shoo his sister and her small friend back out into the garden. Or out of the hall, at least.

“If it does mean more fighting,” he says while he closes the front door behind himself to ward off the inevitable eavesdroppers, “can we just skip that?”

“I’m not here to fight,” Liam replies. He takes his sunnies off. “There’s something you need to see.”

“All right?” Joshua crosses his arms, trying not to stare at the bruise on Liam’s face. “What?”

“It’s not here, mate. You’re gonna need to come with me.”

“ _Me_ , come with—”

“Yeah, all right, never mind, I don’t know why the hell I came here. Forget it.” He turns his back on Joshua and starts to walk away, heavy shoes stomping on the veranda.

“No, wait, come on, Liam.” Joshua goes after him. “Can’t you tell me what it is? I can decide if it’s worth it.”

Liam stops, turns back. “Believe me, it’s better if I show you. I’m not sure it’s... Look, it has to do with Marcello, all right?”

The silence is heavy. Joshua swallows. Something has changed between them. They’ve done fighting. It didn’t get them anywhere except the police station, and he has no desire to repeat that. He tries to think of what Marcello would do, and runs a hand through his hair with a sigh. Maybe it’s time to take a leap of faith, then, if just for his friend’s sake.

“I’ll come,” he says, voice unexpectedly soft to his own ears.

Liam searches his face intently, then tilts his chin up and gives the smallest of nods. Joshua suddenly feels rather self-conscious and looks at his feet, letting his hair fall around his face.

“Well?” Liam is by his motorcycle now, holding out a spare helmet. _Oh_.

“Uhm.”

Liam smirks at him, as if to say, _I knew it_ , and Joshua grimaces, marching towards him. He will _not_ be bloody outdone.

* * *

They’ve walked out of Watunga proper, into the surrounding woods, clambering over rocks and fallen trees and – in Lars’s case – anxiously checking the ground for hiding snakes. He has no idea where exactly they are, but his phone has little to no connection, so they’ve evidently come quite a way. He can only follow the yellow-purple figure of Alex, so he does, because the last thing he wants right now is to lose them and _also_ get lost among the trees.

He does have to call them back a few times, because they disregard obstacles completely, or make the obstacles disregard _them_ with no consideration for physics, and they don’t seem to understand that that’s not something Lars can also do.

There are so many questions he wants to ask about that. Too many. He can’t figure out where to start.

And so, they just walk instead.

Lars feels sticky with sweat by the time they reach a small stream that seems... Familiar. Over time, Lars and his friends have explored practically all of the direct surroundings of Watunga – first in search of the perfect place to settle their kingdom, when they were just nine years old, and later simply because they wanted to – but everything still looks rather alike.

Except... No, he really does know this particular place, he realises as they follow the water upstream.

“Alex,” he says, and they look over their shoulder, tossing one of the braids across their back. “We’re close to Refik’s.”

“Yes,” they say, nodding sagely.

“No, I mean, we’re close to his house.”

“House?”

“Yeah, where he lives with his brother.”

Alex blinks, then says, “That is good,” and walks on.

Lars follows, because what else can he do? His phone is connecting now, and of course he has a bunch of messages from Peter and Ashleigh. He decides to reply later, because they have reached the back of Refik’s garden, and Alex is looking very intently at the pile of cool rocks that marks its boundary. Most of them are shiny, and they had been infinitely interesting when they were younger, but now they’re just rocks, really.

“What is it?” he asks Alex, and they stretch a hand out towards the pile as if they can move it with their mind. Which – Lars reckons that might just be the case, all things considered, but it doesn’t happen.

“Refik,” they just say, gaze imploring on Lars. It’s like they’re trying to tell him something without words. _Oh my god_ , he thinks, what if they can read minds?

“Refik?” he echoes. Alex nods. Thinking, Lars scratches his lightly sunburnt nose – they should get Alex some sunscreen, he notes absently – and decides the best thing to do is climb the rocks. Is this where Alex saw Refik? Maybe there’s a clue about his whereabouts around.

So he climbs, while Alex looks after him intently from the bottom of the pile. From here, he can see up the slope of the garden straight into Kostas and Refik’s house. Or he could, if the curtains weren’t drawn. Kostas must be out, maybe still looking for Refik, or anything that can point towards him. Guilt settles heavy in Lars’s chest. They need to help him out somehow. Maybe dad will cook for him or something like that.

“What do you want me to do?” he asks Alex, because there is nothing here. He raises his voice ever so slightly to be heard over the small distance and the tinkling of water.

“Refik,” they say.

“Yeah, Alex, Refik lives here. What are...” A noise catches his attention. He narrows his eyes and pricks up his ears. A faint echo swirls around him.

“—ou? Is that you, Lars?” It sounds distant, but unmistakeable.

“ _Refik_ ,” he breathes, looking around. “Refik? Where are you? Alex, what’s—”

“I don’t know where I am!” Refik’s voice seems muffled, as if he’s talking through a wall, but at the same time, it echoes hollowly around Lars, making it impossible to pinpoint where it is coming from. There is nothing to be seen, just the trees and the house and Alex, looking up at him very intently still.

“I’m home,” Refik says, sounding scared. “I’m home but it’s so – so silent and there’s no one else. Please get me out!”

Lars breathes quickly, fingers clenching on the rocks, covering the faint shimmer and a scratchy symbol on the highest one.

“Lars? Can you hear me? Please get me out!”

Never has Lars heard his friend like this, so upset, on the verge of crying. Refik is the quiet, smart one, the one who stops the others – mostly Peter and Ashleigh – from doing dumb things like eating worms and antagonising their teachers. He’s not supposed to sound like this.

“I’m here,” he says loudly. “We’ll get you out of there, I promise.”

Alex cocks their head at him, their eyes sad but curious.

“We made a new friend,” he continues, smiling at them. “They’ll help.”

“Please.” It’s silent for a moment. Then, sounding even further away, more hollow, “Lars, something is coming again! It’s so dark—”

“What’s dark? What is—” Lars shouts, panicked. “Refik? Refik!”

His voice becomes choppy, as if there’s static on the line, but Lars hears his friend say, “Tell Kos...’m fine....want...go home.”

“Refik? _Refik_?”

Silence.

“Alex, what was that? What happened to him? Where is he?” Lars practically falls down the pile of rocks, chafing his hands and knees. “Where is he?”

Alex looks up at him sadly, and answers, “Somewhere else.”

* * *

If anyone would have told Joshua just this morning that he’d be spending his afternoon wandering through the woods south of Mate Street with Liam Jones, he’d have laughed at them. It still seems slightly surreal, but here he is, hobbling after his former classmate – who’s wearing very sensible shoes – on his thongs.

“If I step on a snake and it bites me, I’m dragging you to court,” he grumbles, more to himself than to Liam.

“Sure you will, lawyer boy.” Liam looks over his shoulder, stopping to let Joshua catch up. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

“Lawyer boy? I guess.” Joshua runs a hand through his hair. How does Liam know which study he’s planning on doing, and _where he lives_ , when he wasn’t even sure of the bloke’s eye colour?

“Then you can fight me in court, hm,” Liam says, scoffing. Then, “All right, we’re here. So you know how I said your Marcello went on a date with a girl from Mate Street?”

“He’s not... Yes, I remember,” Joshua replies, clenching his jaw. Now’s not the time to get angry at Liam.

“Well, I had a look around, yeah, and I... All right, just look, and tell me if I’m wrong, but—”

Joshua looks where he points, and _no_ , he is not wrong, but by god, he wishes he was.

“That’s Marcello’s jacket,” he says hollowly. “What’s – how did you find that?”

Liam shrugs. “I didn’t see his car anywhere and I just kept walking. Didn’t really expect to find anything.”

They both stare at the bundle of fabric lying underneath a tree. It’s bright yellow, something only Marcello could possibly pull off while still looking stylish. Of course he’d have worn it on that date.

“Did he ever arrive at that girl’s?” Joshua wonders out loud.

“Don’t know.” Liam pushes his shoe into the moss. “Seemed like a bit much to go and ask her, yeah?”

“Yeah. I guess,” he replies absently. What reason would Marcello have had to be all the way out here? Did his car break down on the way out of the village and did he get lost? Maybe he met an unfriendly animal in the woods and had to flee. Joshua’s heart aches at the thought of what could have happened to his best friend.

“You reckon we can look around here a bit?” he asks Liam, who shrugs. He has pushed his hands deep in the pockets of his jeans, giving him a distinctly uncomfortable look. Joshua would probably feel like gloating about that if he weren’t so preoccupied.

As it stands, he settles for tilting his head and walking ahead of Liam, past Marcello’s jacket. He doesn’t touch it – his brother is a police officer, he knows one or two things about the validity of evidence, although he hates having to think of it as that.

The trees press around them, thick foliage obscuring the sunlight and dappling the moss with green. Although the air is warm, it’s not oppressively so anymore. It would be idyllic, but something is wrong. Joshua glances around himself, between the trees and the bushes, not sure what he’s expecting to find, if anything.

Liam is silent, but the muffled footsteps behind Joshua make it clear he’s following. It would be idyllic, yes – but it’s too quiet. That’s the problem. Not a lot of birds, and no snakes have come out to bite his toes. Is there a storm coming? He looks up, finding a sliver of blue between the leaves.

Hm, probably n—

“ _Joshua_ ,” Liam yells behind him, and Joshua startles, whipping his head back and _his foot is sliding away_ , what the _hell_ , and then Liam is grabbing his forearm and pulling at him, pulling him up before Joshua even realises he’d been falling.

Liam’s eyes are wide – terrified. Joshua can feel his heart beat in his throat, and it seems to threaten to leap out altogether when he glances back and there’s just... _Nothing_.

A massive chasm opens up behind him, splitting the forest floor neatly in two as if a giant pair of scissors has come through. It seems to swallow up the sounds of the forest, and their breathing sounds unbelievably loud. Joshua can only stare. Some earth tumbles over the edge, the jagged ridge of moss and tree roots, and it’s a full two seconds before it hits the shadowed bottom.

“I can’t believe you, you fucking idiot!” Liam snaps, his fingers clenching on Joshua’s arm before he lets go. “How did you not see that?”

“I was thinking.” His voice doesn’t even squeak, Joshua notes with relief.

Liam’s upper lip twitches, but he doesn’t say anything even though he’s obviously dying to.

Joshua swallows. “What if – if Marcello...” He looks back at the gaping hole and feels his stomach lurch. Taking a step away from it, he runs his hands over his face. God, what _if_ Marcello? On the one hand, he doesn’t want to think about the mere possibility, but on the other, he _has_ to know. He just has to.

So, without saying anything else, he turns and starts walking along the edge of the huge chasm, carefully watching his feet. Liam follows.

“Has this always been here?” he asks after a while.

“I don’t think so,” Joshua replies. He may not know the woods as intimately as Ashleigh does, but he’s quite sure this is _new_. Is that possible, ravines just opening up out of nowhere? “I don’t go into the woods as often as my sister does, though.”

Liam hums, and they continue walking south slowly. It’s still quiet, until Liam begins humming a melody under his breath, occasionally even interspersed with muttered singing. Joshua feels his lips twitch into a smile without his permission – is this what the guy’s like when there’s no one around to annoy? Does he just hum—

“Liam, is that _Into the Woods_?” he asks when he recognises the tune. The humming abruptly cuts off, and Joshua laughs nervously. Probably shouldn’t have said that. If they get into a fight now, one of them could easily... A shiver runs through his body as he looks down into the nothingness of the huge chasm, the bottom a distant thing bathed in darkness, and – _no_.

He stops.

“Liam,” he whispers.

“Shut up, it’s my favourite musical and none of your fucking business.”

“I – no – what?” He looks up into the boy’s glaring face. “You have a favourite – no, _look_.”

Liam does look then, down and _down_ and his face loses all expression all at once.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters. “Fucking hell, Joshua, is that...”

He doesn’t want to look, but he has to. Down and down to where the shadows bend around an unmistakeably human shape, skin darkened against a bright white t-shirt.

“Jesus fuck,” Liam is muttering now. “Bloody fucking hell.”

“Will you – will you _please_ shut up?” Joshua grits out. He clenches his hands into fists, trying to stop his fingers from shaking, but it doesn’t stop the feeling that he’s about to be sick from rising in his throat. He closes his eyes tightly for just a moment, tuning out Liam’s continued swearing and taking a deep breath, and forces himself to look down again. When he takes a small step forward, the moss giving way under his thongs, he’s surprised and startled to feel Liam grab his upper arm, as if to hold him back. He ignores it and looks.

The shirt is the easiest to see, the lightest colour. Slowly, he begins to make out dark trousers, arms and legs akimbo, and pitch dark hair like an ink stain. _Dark hair_. Marcello’s hair is a bright auburn.

“Liam, I don’t... I don’t think that’s Marcello,” he says, although it comes out as a whisper. Liam’s fingers clench on his arm hard enough that they promise more bruises. Joshua tries to shake him off, but he only tugs him back and looks at him with a frantic glint in his hazel eyes. Who knew the bloke would be so expressive without those eternal sunglasses, now tucked into his shirt?

“If it’s not Marcello, then who the _fuck_ —”

“I don’t—” _No_. Joshua’s breathing speeds up. Oh, _fuck no_. He tries to swallow around the lump in his throat. “My sister’s friend is missing. Uhm, Re— Refik Adnan. He’s, he does... I have to call my brother.”

“Your brother? Why – oh, the copper.”

“Yeah,” Joshua says, his hands shaking as much as his voice while he fumbles his phone out of his pocket. Liam finally lets go of his arm when he takes a step back to check the reception.

Just the one bar, but that should be enough.

Liam paces back and forth quite a way from the edge of the chasm while Joshua talks to David, unsure whether he’s actually making any sense at all. God, he hopes he’s wrong. He doesn’t want Ashleigh to lose a friend any more than he does himself.

“He’s coming. The police are coming,” he tells Liam, who keeps pacing while Joshua sits down heavily on a tree trunk, all the strength leaving his body. “And will you _please_ stop fucking _singing_!”

* * *

Lars and Alex are just about to turn west to enter Watunga again when the sirens pass. They startle Alex, who shrinks in on themself. Lars touches their arm lightly, but he follows the sirens and accompanying lights with his eyes. Police. Where are they going?

“Lars,” Alex says, voice soft, and when he turns to them, they’re pointing down the dirt road they had been following, to where Lars can see his friends coming up the hill with their bikes – well, Ashleigh has _his_ bike. She has _got_ to get her own at some point. Lars waves at them, a little sheepishly. He should really have sent a message.

Well, too late for that now.

He waits until they have caught up with him and Alex with his hands pushed into the pockets of his shorts. The sirens have stopped not far from here. Somewhere at the edge of the woods?

“Where were you!” Ashleigh exclaims at the both of them.

A glance at Alex confirms that they’re probably not going to say anything.

“We, uhm,” Lars starts. “Alex said they’d seen Refik in the woods, so we went to take a look.”

Alex nods sagely. Ashleigh frowns while Peter’s eyes widen.

“They saw Refik?” he asks. “And— Hey, wait, is that my shirt?”

After glancing down at themself, Alex shoots Lars a stricken look, so he explains about the clothes and how they walked through the woods, but he’s interrupted by his brother before he can get to the best part.

“Ashleigh and I were following the police. David got a call and he just went off even though he wasn’t on duty. We wanna know what happened. Maybe they found Refik, yeah?”

 _Unlikely_ , Lars wants to say, but he concedes to telling them the rest of his and Alex’s adventure in a bit and takes his bike from Ashleigh, who lets him with a small grin.

Peter is off like a rocket, ever the enthusiastic one, and Lars trails behind a bit to let Alex catch up. They’re frowning a little, seemingly worried.

“Don’t worry,” he tells them gently, smiling when they look up at him with wide eyes, “they’re not angry, not really. They just don’t like being left out of adventures, is all.”

“Is this an ‘adventure’?” Alex asks.

“It is a bit. An adventure is something exciting that doesn’t happen a lot. That you don’t know what to expect of, yeah?”

They nod.

It’s kind of nice, to be able to teach them simple things like that, even if it pains Lars to wonder just why they don’t have a grasp of concepts like the days of the week or the meaning of the word adventure. Later, he tells himself, or rather sooner, they’ll have to find a way to help Alex properly. Get them a guardian, a parent. Someone who’ll take care of them like Lars’s dad takes care of him and Peter. Lars and his friends can only teach them so much.

“They’re over there!” Peter is hissing from the top of a small hill, and Lars becomes aware of flashing blue lights on the other side of it, casting ghostly shadows on the leaves of the bush his brother and Ashleigh are hiding in. He climbs up too, and the four of them huddle together almost like they normally do, except instead of Refik’s dark head at the end of the row, it’s Alex’s platinum blond. It’s nearly luminous.

There is a dell on the other side of the hill, a patch without trees, and a gigantic _rip_ running through the earth, along the edge of which the police are milling restlessly, kicking up moss with heavy boots and talking into walkie-talkies.

“Is that my brother?” Ashleigh asks, sounding incredulous.

“Well, obviously,” Peter replies, “we followed him—”

“Not Dave. Josh.” She squints. “It _is_ , with that bloke he fought! What the hell are they doing out here?”

After taking another look, Lars sees Ashleigh’s brother – the middle one – talking to a police officer. He has a big bruise on his face, which is new. Did Ashleigh say he _fought_ someone? As far as Lars knows, Josh is the only member of the Clarke family who doesn’t get himself into situations that cause bodily harm on a regular basis. There’s a guy with him who looks vaguely familiar, but most of the inhabitants of Watunga do. That’s what you get, in such a small town. Did Josh fight _him_? So weird.

“What are _they_ doing?” Peter asks, and when they look at him, he’s pointing at a cluster of officers, including the sergeant they talked to at school, pulling at yellow ropes, as if...

“I think they’re hoisting something out of that ravine,” Lars says. He hears Ashleigh suck in a sharp breath next to him, and knows what she’s thinking. “It can’t be Refik, guys, I told you, Alex and I—”

Peter shushes him, and Lars complies only because something is rising above the edge of the chasm, the rip, whatever it is, and all the people clustered around it fall silent as well. It is deafening; there aren’t even any birds singing.

The small shape is lowered to the forest floor carefully, wordlessly, and when the police step back, Ashleigh’s elder brother is there with an expression on his face Lars has never seen before, not on that man. It makes him look much older and very, very tired. He pushes both hands into his hair, turns away, and then the four of them can see—

“ _Refik_ ,” Peter breathes, his voice shaky.

It can’t be, Lars _knows_ it can’t be, because he just talked to him, just promised to get him out of wherever he is, but the shape on the ground has his friend’s dark hair and is wearing what he had on when they saw him last. But it’s still, lifeless and grey and _wrong_.

“It can’t be him,” he says, with certainty. “It can’t be.”

“It is,” Ashleigh says, her fingers touching his elbow for a second as if she wants to soothe him. But he doesn’t need soothing! He needs them to listen!

“No, it _can’t_ be, because I talked to him just now. Alex took me to his house and I _heard_ him by the rocks in the yard. I swear, whatever that is, it’s not Refik.”

“Lars,” Ashleigh says, brow creased and mouth downturned.

“You’re such an idiot!” Peter snaps, and they instinctively duck behind the bushes to avoid being spotted, even Alex, never mind that everyone down there is busy with – that _thing_ that is not Refik. Peter continues in a hiss.

“You’re an _idiot_. We have no idea what that kid can do!” He gestures at Alex, who looks even paler now, scared and sad. “Who’s to say they didn’t mess with your mind, Lars? Refik – Refik is _dead_ and if it turns out they know more about it, I’ll bloody well get it out of them myself!”

“Peter,” Ashleigh says.

“What! Tell me I’m wrong. We don’t know anything about them.” His voice breaks.

“I know what I heard, Peter,” Lars says, reaching for Alex to stop them from running away, which is what he would do in their situation. They make a small noise of distress. “Refik is somewhere else and he wants to get out of there. He wants to go home. We have to help him!”

“We _can’t_ , Lars.” Peter stands up, tears streaked down his cheeks. “We can’t, because he’s not coming back, no matter what _Alex_ says.”

“It wasn’t Alex—”

“Guys,” Ashleigh says, her voice small. “Please just... Don’t do this.”

Lars sees his brother’s jaw clench unhappily. Peter used to get angry, properly angry, quite often when they were younger, but he doesn’t do that anymore, not if he can help it. Doesn’t smash things or hit people or yell mean things at their dad. Now, he just stares at Lars with watery eyes that are angry and sad at the same time.

“Just don’t,” Ashleigh repeats, voice now breaking on a sob.

Down by the chasm, the police are putting up tape in silence, talking to people on phones and walkie-talkies, and Ashleigh’s brothers are talking with shuttered expressions while the other boy, the one with the dark hair and the sunglasses, is sitting on the ground with his head in his hands.

“It’s not Refik,” Lars whispers, and he doesn’t need to look at his brother’s face to recognise his angry expression; he knows the measured breathing well enough. Alex is silent behind him. They seem to be trying to blend into the shadows, with remarkable success considering their pale hair and skin.

“Guys,” Ashleigh tries again, “please, we’re all – we’re all upset, but we’ve got to be there for Kostas. Don’t do this now, you can – can argue another time.”

The brothers continue staring at each other, then Peter shakes his head, wipes his eyes brusquely, and turns to walk back to his bike. With a last pleading glance at Lars and Alex, Ashleigh sighs and follows him.

“It’s not Refik, is it?” Lars asks Alex. They un-hunch their shoulders slightly and shake no.

“Your friend is not happy,” they observe, touching their fingers to his elbow like Ashleigh had done.

“My brother,” he amends. “No. He doesn’t believe us, but I’ll prove it to him. I’ll prove Refik is _alive_ , and we’re gonna get him back. Yeah?”

Pressing his lips together in determination, he turns fully to Alex.

“Yes,” they say, the S barely audible.

“Good.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ALSO FEATURING  
> Peter and Lars's father (Torbjörn Oxenstierna) - Sweden
> 
> I always say the Sound of Music is my favorite film for lack of any other ideas, but as far as musicals go, I do actually love Into The Woods :'D
> 
> There are three POV characters in this story (well, disregarding TRNC in the prologue) and the third one still hasn't shown up ri p


	4. December 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so we finally meet the third POV character......

She did not expect the police yesterday, certainly did not expect the terrible news that a 12-year-old boy was found dead in _her_ woods. And certainly not Refik Adnan. Angélique knows the boy’s brother quite well; the two of them moved to Watunga at about the same time and have become good friends. She can only imagine how he must be feeling. It would be good to stop by after work and see if she can do anything for him.

The woods seem a little darker now when she wanders through them, a little less safe. Still, it’s her job to watch out – and didn’t that work out great – so she does. She checks for traps – they’ve been known to appear, although usually not during the summer when there tend to be more people in the woods – and eliminates the possibility of a fire smouldering somewhere near the village, and when she returns to the gamekeepers’ cottage, there is a dark grey four wheel drive parked on the path behind it. Two people are leaning against its bonnet in the shadow of the trees.

Angélique frowns, but keeps walking.

Closer, she recognises one of them as sergeant Clarke, whom she has met briefly once or twice before. He’s not wearing a uniform right now, though, but dressed plainly in jeans and a t-shirt. The other person seems familiar as well, but she’s not sure from where.

The sergeant straightens when she nears, and calls out a greeting.

“Hi,” she returns, stopping at the edge of the path. “Can I help you? Is this about Refik?”

“In a way,” he says. “Angélique Verlaque, yeah? The gamekeeper?”

“That’s me,” she confirms.

“Right. I’m David Clarke, I’m sure we’ve met, and this is Riley Greenwood.”

The name rings a bell. “Oh, yes, you work at the museum, isn’t it?”

“They own the museum.”

Riley shrugs. “I do.”

“All right, well.” Angélique tucks an errant curl into her ponytail. “What can I do for you, then?”

David – sergeant Clarke, she isn’t sure if he’s here in any official capacity, what with the lack of uniform – nods, runs a hand over the stubble on his chin. He looks tired, although that doesn’t make him less handsome. She’d have to be blind not to see that.

“You heard about Refik Adnan, yeah?” he asks, and she nods, biting her lower lip. “We’re currently treating his death as an accident, but I was wondering about something. Do you have any maps of the area?”

“I should, but so does the county. They probably have more recent versions.”

He glances at Riley, who tilts their head with a smile, as if saying _I told you so_. He sighs and turns back to Angélique.

“This isn’t technically part of the investigation, Angélique.”

Interest piqued, she raises her eyebrows.

“Seeing as there really isn’t an investigation – anyway, look, Riley has got some old maps at the museum, but yours are probably in better condition. Let us just have a look and we’ll be out of that hair of yours before you know it.”

Angélique glances at Riley, who is looking both fond and slightly exasperated. All right, he’s always like that, then. She quirks her lips at them, touching her ponytail, and they roll their eyes.

“Fine,” she tells David. “Come on in, then. It’s a mess, though, so consider yourselves warned.”

Riley pushes away from the car and follows David after Angélique has unlocked the door of the cottage and gestured him inside.

They pause at the door to tell her, “Dave’s bloody stubborn, but I’ll try to reel him in if he goes overboard, yeah? I’ve known him longer than today.”

New Zealander accent. Huh. She follows them into the cabin, which is as dim and dusty as ever, and flings her rucksack into a corner of the tiny hallway, where it _thumps_ against the weatherboard. It’s not as if she spends a lot of time here, so she doesn’t really clean up that often. You don’t become a gamekeeper if you enjoy sitting inside.

“Maps should be over there.” She walks to the desk pushed against the small window, where the dust swirls in the morning sun and documents are stacked haphazardly, and old-fashioned rotary telephone balancing on top of them. It’s useful, every now and then.

Angélique pulls open drawers until she finds a folder labelled ‘survey maps’, trying and failing to ignore David Clarke looming over her or Riley Greenwood puttering around the small cottage, opening the overflowing cabinets and testing the tap in the kitchen for some reason.

“Here you go then.” She holds the file out to David, but doesn’t let go when he grabs it. He looks down at her, a crease appearing between his – impressively sized – eyebrows.

“Problem?”

She bites the inside of her cheek. “If... Listen, Kostas Tophi is my friend, all right? If you somehow know, or find out, that something bad – something other than an accident – happened to his brother, he deserves to know.”

David has green eyes, very green, and they flick from the file up to her as she speaks, a curious glint lighting in them. Tilting his chin up, he nods slowly.

“Of course. It may be nothing, but...”

“It’s worth looking into,” Riley finishes, and they flash a smile at Angélique. “Dave, we should tell her what we’re here for. She might just know the answer anyway. Gamekeeper and all.”

The dust swirls erratically when David sighs and sits down heavily on the ancient chair at the desk. He pulls a face when it creaks, and Angélique can’t help but huff a laugh.

“All right, listen, Refik was found in a – a ravine. This huge chasm. But neither of us have any memory of that being there, or anything else ever happening near it. We couldn’t find anything on the maps either.”

“A chasm?”

“Just a _rip_ in the ground.” He pulls a seemingly random map out of the folder and, after a contemplative look at the messy desk, spreads it out over his knees and points. “It starts over by Saleyards Road and goes northwest, but I’m not sure where it ends, exactly. It’s like it wasn’t there before.”

Walking around the chair, Angélique looks over his shoulder at the map. David taps restless, callused fingers on the edge of it.

“There isn’t anything there, I’m sure,” Angélique says.

“Ravines _can_ just appear, can’t they?” Riley asks, coming up to stand at David’s other shoulder.

“When there’s an earthquake, yeah. We don’t really get earthquakes strong enough to do things like that, and none recently, anyway.”

“Of course.”

David looks up over his shoulder. “And you’re certain?”

“Yes, I’m sure.” Angélique frowns. The last time she was in the woods between Mate Street and Saleyards Road was just Monday, and no, there definitely haven’t been any earthquakes since then. They’re not so common anyway, not big ones. Maybe something more localised? “But even if that thing wasn’t there before, that only makes it more likely that Refik... That he fell into it. Yeah?”

“I know,” David says distractedly, picking up the folder and folding the map back into it before pulling other ones out. “But something about it doesn’t feel right.”

Angélique glances at Riley, who shrugs in a way that isn’t quite apologetic, more amused. She smiles a little.

“Well?” David says. “Help me out. I want to know if there’s anything we can get from those maps, or any records you might have.”

Another glance, then Riley says, “You mean you need _us_ to look. You can’t even concentrate long enough to get through the newspaper, Dave.”

He glares at them, and they laugh.

“Really,” they tell Angélique, “how this one ever got promoted to sergeant is one of the greatest mysteries of our time.”

“I can bloody hear you, Riles. Are you two helping or not?”

“Obviously,” Riley says, and it’s not clear which part of that statement they are responding to, but they take a map and kneel, spreading it out on the worn wooden floor of the cabin, so Angélique bites her lip and follows the example. Kostas deserves to know as much as possible, after all.

* * *

Joshua isn’t even surprised, this time, when Liam shows up at his house – he wonders, again, how the bloke knows where he lives, but this _is_ Watunga – but he doesn’t feel like hanging around there, in the yard or the house, so they start wandering around Watunga without any destination in mind, practically wordlessly.

It’s a little cloudy today, and the air feels humid. It might rain for Christmas.

“Is it normal that this itches so much?” Joshua asks Liam after a long while, gesturing at the side of his face.

“Don’t know. I guess.”

Joshua must look surprised – he _feels_ mildly surprised underneath the dull mix of sadness and panic that hasn’t gone away since yesterday afternoon – because Liam raises his eyebrows so high they appear from behind his sunnies.

“What, you think I’m an expert or something?”

Joshua shrugs. He kicks a pebble lying on the pavement away, and it skids into someone’s garden.

“You’ve got a weird image of me in your head, mate,” Liam huffs, and he sounds annoyed but not angry. If anything, he sounds  _disappointed_. He doesn’t actually care what Joshua of all people thinks about him, does he? The notion is so ridiculous that Joshua actually snickers.

“What the fuck is funny about that?”

“Nothing,” he’s quick to tell Liam. And then, because he can’t help himself after having spent the past four years giving him knee-jerk responses, “So you always win fights, then, is that it?”

“Oh, fuck off,” Liam says, and speeds. Joshua is taller than him and has no problem keeping up. They have already reached the southern edge of the village, where their former high school is. It’s a strange thought still that they’ll never be going back there. The pupils of the lower years have classes now, although probably not much of an excuse for actual education. It’s the last day, after all.

“Are you really going to work for your father?” he asks Liam when they’ve passed the building. Mr Jones is some sort of real estate magnate – really, Joshua has never bothered to learn exactly what he does – and doesn’t seem to be home a lot, if the rumours he used to hear at school are anything to go by. Liam sighs, runs his fingers through his dark hair.

“I don’t—” He quiets, and when Joshua glances up at him, his jaw is clenched. “That’s none of your fucking business, Joshua.”

Fair enough, Joshua supposes. It’s not as if they’re friends. He watches him out of the corner of his eye for a moment, watches him squint through his sunglasses and chew on his lip. He’s so _human_ , but it’s strange to think of him as anything other than _annoying_ or _circumstantial ally_ , so Joshua shoves that thought away.

They reach Marcello’s house, where they both speed up slightly, without looking at each other. Joshua isn’t even sure why he does, personally. He’s got no reason to feel guilty about anything; they even mentioned finding Marcello’s jacket to the police and all. But still, something unpleasantly heavy has settled in his stomach that he doesn’t want to think about right now.

“How’s your sister?” Liam asks, a while later, when they’ve rounded the corner of Clara and Winton Street and are walking north again, having finished circling Watunga.

“My sister.”

“You said yesterday that – that kid was her friend.”

“Oh. Yes.” He swallows. “She was... Quiet. I don’t know. They’re having a meeting at the primary now. Not exactly the best way to end the school year.”

Ashleigh being silent is, in many ways, even more concerning than David being silent. His sister just doesn’t stop making small noises at any time, no matter how concentrated she is. And she does get very concentrated, mostly when she draws. It’s a single-minded focus Joshua has sometimes been jealous of, when he was studying and his mind wouldn’t shut up about what else he needed to do or when he had to read the same passage in a book three times because he was more focussed on listing supplies for one thing or another. He knows he worries a lot. Somebody has to.

While Liam hums silently – a song Joshua doesn’t recognise this time – Joshua shoves his hands into his pockets, and they walk on.

* * *

Everyone is sent home early after lunch, with none of the festive cheer that usually comes with the last day of the school year. Lars just wants to scream at everyone that Refik is _alive_ , you idiots! He’s _out there_ and he needs help. But he realises it would be futile. He’ll have to do it himself, with Alex’s help.

Dad picks Lars, his brother, and Ashleigh up from school and takes them all to Lars’s house. Ashleigh has been sitting between the two of them for the whole morning, and Lars and Peter have barely exchanged a word at all.

Apparently, dad visited Kostas, which Lars is grateful for. He can’t tell him that Refik is still alive, but at least everyone can do their best to help him until he comes back.

At the earliest opportunity, Lars excuses himself, sneaks some more food out of the pantry, and races to the tree house. Alex is in pretty much exactly the same spot as he left them last night after sneaking them to the bathroom when dad was talking to the police who came to the door. Their pointy knees are drawn up to their chest and those strange eyes stare blankly into the shadows.

“Hi,” Lars offers, clambering on to the floor. Alex blinks as if they didn’t hear him coming.

“Hi,” they echo silently. “You’re back.”

“Of course I am.” He smiles a little. “What do we do now?”

“Do?”

“Yeah.”

“I...” They tug at one of their braids. “I don’t know.”

“That’s okay,” Lars says, trying to soothe the anxious tone in their voice. “We’ll figure it out.”

He hesitates, and Alex tilts their head questioningly.

Tapping his nose in thought, he says, “You said Refik was somewhere else.” A nod, slow and steady but still inquisitive. “Is... Have you been there?”

“Yes,” they breathe.

“All right, and—”

“Dangerous.”

Lars stops, mouth hanging slightly open.

“What?”

“Dangerous,” Alex repeats, their eyes wide and shimmering in a way that’s almost pleading. “I’m on this side now.”

He swallows. “And is it safe _here_ , then?”

Eyebrows making a complicated leap, Alex makes a little noise that is neither confirming nor denying. Lars sighs.

“Are you... Sad?” Alex asks.

“A little,” Lars admits. “I wish I knew what to do.”

Very slowly, Alex reaches out to him and touches his elbow. He smiles.

“Thank you.” And, because he suddenly feels restless, “Do you want to go back to Refik’s garden? Maybe we’ll hear him again.”

“I... Want...” Alex trails off and frowns in concentration. Then, they suddenly smile. “Yes. I want that.”

“All right, okay, great. Let’s – Alex, let’s use the ladder this time.”

But they don’t. Instead, they step out of the tree house, and when Lars looks down, still mildly concerned about them, they smile again, quite brilliantly. Lars smiles back – he can’t help it, it’s infectious – and he feels something shift. Next thing he knows is that he’s floating calmly down to the dry grass as well, limbs locked in place with shock.

Alex blinks innocently at him, but there is some fear in their face. Some apprehension.

“I... Alex, that was awesome!”

They smile.

“But you can’t just do that to anyone, all right?”

A solemn nod and another touch to his elbow. Lars laughs, grabs their hand and tugs them through the bushes around the backyard.

* * *

A buzz of Joshua’s phone on the table next to his plate. He grabs it eagerly, still hoping for news from Marcello. _Anything_. He sighs when he sees it’s a message from his friend’s grandfather instead. Although he has half a mind not to open it, Liam makes a curious noise around his sandwich, so he taps the notification.

_Hello Joshua, marcello says he is with his cousins in Canberra, he sent a message just now. I am glad hes okay. Regards Marco vargas._

“What,” Joshua breathes, and turns the screen to Liam without a thought. “That can’t be right. He wouldn’t just...”

Liam is looking intently at him when he lifts his gaze, hazel eyes sharp. His lashes are ridiculously long, Joshua notes distractedly when he lowers his gaze to the remainder of his foot. They practically skim his cheekbones. Joshua blinks and picks up his own sandwich. One of the best things about working at the bakery is that he gets a good discount, and they do have very nice sandwiches.

“Would he really not?” Liam asks.

“No. You were right yesterday, you know. Marcello is a decent person.” _Unlike either of us, apparently_. “He wouldn’t take off without telling someone to at least look after his grandpa.”

“Maybe he got sick of it,” he suggests. Joshua bristles on Marcello’s behalf, and Liam huffs. “All right, fine, don’t get your knickers in a twist. Just pointing out what could be a logical explanation for all this.”

“But his _jacket_ ,” Joshua reminds him.

Liam bites his lip. “Yeah, all right. That would just make no fucking sense, then.”

In the far distance, thunder rolls. Probably across the mountains – there will definitely be a storm coming through tonight. Good. Joshua’s plants could use some water.

“What a mess,” he says. “What the hell is going on? People disappearing, and I’m having _lunch_ with _Liam Jones_.”

To his surprise, Liam actually laughs at that – not the sardonic chuckle he’s used to, but something that sounds honestly amused and oddly melodious. Liam is gazing down when Joshua looks up at him in surprise, with those lashes fanned over his cheeks. He clears his throat lightly and pushes the rest of his sandwich into his mouth.

“Maybe we should go see Marcello’s grandpa,” Liam says.

“Hm?” Joshua swallows. “Why?”

He shrugs, gaze skittering around the bakery. _We_. Isn’t that weird? Still, Joshua would like to go and see Mr Vargas, even if he isn’t quite sure why, so he nods.

With Liam also having finished his lunch, they set out for Clara Street once again and ring Mr Vargas’s doorbell. The old man opens the door looking better than yesterday, if still tired. The lines around his eyes are more pronounced than Joshua is used to.

“Joshua, how nice of you to come by. Who’s your friend – oh, look at you two! Did you have a fight?”

“I’m Liam Jones,” Liam quickly answers from half next to – half behind Joshua. “We just had a, uhm. A misunderstanding, but it’s fine now.”

Mr Vargas shakes his head disapprovingly, tutting in a parental manner at their matching bruises, but that doesn’t stop him from gesturing them both inside and through the house to the veranda, where they have to sit crammed together on the swinging couch suspended from the awning. That’s fine when it’s Marcello, but now just has them both going rigid while Mr Vargas happily tells them how glad he is that his grandson is fine.

Liam’s leg keeps moving against Joshua’s, and he can hear the bloke swallow heavily every now and then.

“Stop it,” he hisses. “It’s just Grandpa Vargas.”

In response, Liam jabs his elbows into Joshua’s side, but he does stop wriggling around so much.

Mr Vargas shows them Marcello’s message, and it seems fine, really, has Marcello written all over it, all complicated emoticons that his grandpa never understands but he keeps sending anyway. Liam seems amused by the man’s insistence that Joshua explain what this one is supposed to be.

Then, while Mr Vargas has gone to the bathroom, Joshua guiltily reaches for the old man’s phone and opens his contacts. He searches for the names of Marcello’s cousins, copying the numbers into his own phone.

“Mate, what are you doing?” Liam asks, luckily not commenting on the picture of his garden he uses as a lock screen.

“I want to call them,” Joshua replies. “I want to know for sure.”

“How devious,” Liam says drily. He leans forward to put his elbows on his knees, but sits back up when the couch swings backwards dangerously. “You know, the solution to this is probably so fucking simple that we just haven’t thought of it.”

Might be, but Joshua isn’t taking chances. He puts Mr Vargas’s phone back on the table just as he returns.

“It is a little strange,” he tells Liam and Joshua, supporting himself on the back of his chair as he sits down. “I understand that Marcello would like to leave. I’m really not that exciting anymore. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Joshua, it’s true. I’m getting old. But why he would go all the way to Canberra when he’s got a cousin right here in Watunga. Granted, they haven’t spoken in a while, but...”

Joshua blinks. “You have more family in Watunga? I didn’t know that.”

“Oh yes, my sister’s grandsons.” He tilts his head. “I don’t see them often.”

Does _Marcello_ even know about that, Joshua wonders. He’s certainly never said anything, and he speaks often about his cousins in Canberra.

“Do we know them?” Liam asks quite loudly, interrupting Mr Vargas’s monologue about his sister and their parents.

“I’m not sure. I think little Luca is almost your age, and Dragos must be closer to your brother’s, Joshua...”

The two of them glance at each other, far too close on the cramped couch, but they both look equally confused. All right, no idea who he’s referring to, then.

“So are you boys staying for dinner?” Mr Vargas then asks, out of nowhere.

“I can’t,” Liam says. “I have to go to work.”

“Joshua?”

“No, I... I need to be home for my sister.” Even now, Joshua is certain that Ashleigh will have more use of her friends than of him, but he likes to think he’s still somewhat useful to his siblings.

There’s another roll of thunder, still distant but noticeably closer. Heavier clouds are peeking out from behind the mountains. Joshua sighs.

“We should go, Mr Vargas.”

“Hm?” Liam says questioningly, but Joshua elbows him in the side, and he quickly covers up. “Yes, we should. It was nice meeting you, sir, but it can’t be helped. You know, work and all that. Sisters—”

Another jab, and he shuts up. Joshua has to bite his lips to stifle his laughter. Liam Jones a bad liar, who’d have thought?

And although he looks a little suspicious – Joshua knows he isn’t stupid, he just misses things every now and then – Mr Vargas lets them go.

“I really do have to go to work in an hour, you know,” Liam informs Joshua, out on Clara Street, “so if you want anything else, it’ll have to wait.” He pauses. Frowns. “Mate, we’ve spent the entire fucking day together. How are we both still alive?”

Joshua huffs a laugh. He’s pretty sure it’s because he’s distracted by everything that’s happening. And maybe Liam is as well, he reckons. He seems to care more about things than he lets on. Instead of saying anything, he just shrugs at him.

“I did want to call Marcello’s cousins.”

“You did. Can you do that without me or do I need to hold your hand?”

Joshua gives Liam a flat look, biting his cheek when he smirks. “I’m fine.”

“I bet.” He runs a hand through his hair. “But really, Joshua, I’m involved now whether you like it or not, so if you do go off and do something else, let me know, yeah? Someone should know where you’re at, and you literally don’t have any friends apart from Mar—”

“I _get it_ , Liam. Thanks for reminding me.” He does appreciate it, really. But how he managed to turn an offer to help into an insult is beyond Joshua.

“No problem, mate.” He pushes his sunnies down from his hair to his nose despite the clouds rolling in on the horizon. “I’m off then. Please do something stupid, I could use a laugh.”

“What the—” But he’s gone already, leaving Joshua on the pavement in front of Marcello’s house, the wildflowers in the garden waving against his calves. “Arse.”

* * *

“The solution is very simple,” says Riley, the only one not sprawled over the floor like a starfish.

“Is it, Riles?” asks David. “Enlighten us lesser minds.”

“You said it yourself, earlier,” they say, standing up from Angélique’s ancient desk chair and shuffling over to the map they’ve put on the wall, on which the three of them have mapped out the huge chasm crossing through the woods with drawing pins and red string.

Angélique found it hard to believe that something like that could have just sprung up out of nowhere, so Riley and David took her to see the rip in the earth before having lunch in the village. It was _surreal_. The thing seems to run along the entire length of Watunga, north-south as if someone has misplaced an underground railway system a few kilometres. And it’s deep. Angélique doesn’t mind heights, but her stomach did turn looking at the shadows playing in the depths of the chasm.

Riley has felt down all their pockets, finally pulls a pen from behind their ear, and writes ‘Huge Chasm’ on the map. They draw an arrow to the string for good measure.

“The simplest solution is that the Huge Chasm did not exist before.”

“How is that _simple_?” David complains, letting his head fall back against the glaringly orange couch that’s clearly seen better days. “We’ve got someone here who studied for this kind of stuff saying it’s impossible.”

“I didn’t say _impossible_ ,” Angélique interrupts, because she didn’t. She also didn’t expressly study geology, for that matter. “I said _unlikely_. I actually think you’re right, Riley, this is just a freak incident. Nature is weird.”

David groans pathetically and falls back to the floor. Angélique and Riley share an amused look.

“Is Dave-o bored?” Riley sing-songs, and David flips them the bird without looking.

“I’m bored,” Angélique says, opting for honesty. She smiles when David makes a triumphant noise and sits up again.

“She’s bored! Look, Riles, I get that you’re a writer and a custodian and all, but the paperwork isn’t why I joined the police, all right?”

“This was your idea,” Riley points out.

“Yes.” David pulls a face. “Yeah, it was, you got me there, but I’m not gonna be able to help anymore. You two have anything to do tonight? I’m supposed to cook, and I think it would be good for Josh and Ashleigh to have some distraction.”

“Who—” Angélique starts, because she’s got no idea who Josh and Ashleigh are. David’s kids? He doesn’t seem like the parental type to her. Well – he could be, probably. He’s a copper, so he’s got to care about people.

“Are you inviting us to dinner to distract your siblings?” Riley asks. “Really?”

“Yeah, ’course.” He shrugs at Angélique, who shakes her head in amusement. It’s odd; she seems to fit into their friendship nearly seamlessly.

“Great, I’m in,” Riley says, and turns expectant brown eyes on her while they wind the pen back into their curls.

“Uh, yeah,” she says.

“Ace.” David grins, but then turns serious. “I want an explanation for the Huge Chasm if there is one, so I know how to stop this from happening again.”

Angélique and Riley nod solemnly. That’s the least they can aim for.

* * *

Alex and Lars are sitting at the foot of the pile of rocks – now as silent as, well, a pile of rocks – and Lars is attempting to teach them how to make flower crowns, but they keep making the flowers bloom and then wilt with a mere touch, so it’s difficult to get a grip on the concept. Lars wasn’t sure Alex was aware what they were doing until he saw them grin mischievously from the corner of his eye, just before all his flowers burst into bloom wildly enough to make him sneeze.

Good. He has the feeling Alex deserves to have fun more than anyone else he knows.

They continue like that for a while, until late in the afternoon – according to the message Ashleigh has sent, dad was a little worried, but she managed to calm him down – and just when Lars is about to say it might be time to go back home, because he’s getting hungry and can imagine Alex is, too, they can hear tyres crunching on the road in front of the house. It’s the last house on Saleyards Road, so it must be coming for Kostas. The police?

Alex makes a questioning noise, and Lars shakes his head.

A car door slams. If it’s not the police, then who can it be? Through the house and the yard, they can very faintly hear the doorbell ring, and after a second, Kostas is _shouting_. Kostas never shouts. Alex flinches, and Lars grabs their hand without thinking. No one knows they’re here; he’s not shouting at the two of them. But still, Kostas shouting? Just like Refik, he’s usually calm and sensible about things; the only thing that really gets to him is...

“Oh,” he breathes. “Oh, Alex, I think that’s Refik and Kostas’s father.”

“Are they fighting?” they ask meekly, fingers clenching on Lars’s and the flowers wilting around both of them.

It’s impossible to hear what’s being said, but it doesn’t sound like Mr Adnan is yelling back. Lars has never really understood what the situation is with the Adnan-Tophi family. Refik seems to like his dad just fine even if he doesn’t see him a lot, but Kostas tends to change the subject when it comes up. And then there’s the fact that they have a different surname, of course.

“I think Kostas is just upset,” he tells Alex.

“But Refik is alive.”

“I know,” he says, then sighs. “We need to get him back before we can tell Kostas. I don’t want to give him false hope.”

He can tell Alex doesn’t really understand what he means, but they nod solemnly anyway, which makes him smile.

Kostas seems to have stopped yelling. Lars hopes Mr Adnan will help him through _Refik’s funeral_ tomorrow. Family is important, he thinks wryly.

“Let’s go home,” he tells Alex.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ALSO FEATURING  
> Mr Adnan - Turkey


	5. December 16

The graveyard is silent, and the air feels heavy over the damp ground. It rained yesterday evening, quite a lot. Lars was soaked to the bone when he went out after dad had gone to sleep to bring a small stockpile of food to Alex. They’d seemed to be awed by the rain.

Now, however, it’s hot again, and Lars feels uncomfortable in his dark clothes. He refuses to look at the casket because he _knows_ Refik isn’t in there. Instead, he just stares at the yellowed grass underneath his feet and turns out the low, sad murmur of voices around him.

Mr Adnan is indeed here, and it seems as though he and Kostas have put aside their differences, because they have practically been keeping each other standing throughout the morning. Refik would be so surprised to see it, while it makes Lars just feel slightly guilty and very sad. He can’t even imagine losing Peter; even if he’s a bit of a jerk sometimes, he’s still his brother.

Dad seems concerned about the silence that lingers between the two of them, but he doesn’t seem to have arrived at the point yet where he makes them _talk to each other_. Plus, Peter doesn’t seem to have let the cat out of the bag with regards to Alex either. When Refik comes back, it’ll all be right. Lars has to believe that.

* * *

Early in the afternoon, David Clarke and Riley Greenwood arrive at the gamekeepers’ cottage again.

David is even more animated than yesterday, his whole body coiled with tension as he paces through the crowded room as much as he can. He knocks against something on every turn and keeps swearing at it as he runs his hands through his dark hair, which is already a mess.

“Is he all right?” Angélique asks Riley, who, for their part, is quite subdued.

“He doesn’t deal well with...”  A vague hand gesture. “Anything. He needs to have something to _do_.”

It’s a feeling Angélique knows well, herself. She hates that she can’t do anything for Kostas besides trying to be there for him. She’s glad his father is here.

“Well,” she says, “David, I remembered something yesterday that might be interesting.”

He stops in the sunlight on the opposite end of the room and looks at her. With the angles of his face shadowed and some strands of hair falling into his light eyes, the sergeant cuts a striking figure in the swirling dust, nothing short of breathtaking.

Angélique blinks the thought away and walks to her desk while she explains.

“When I first started this job, I tried to clean up in here. Evidently, it wasn’t a success.” She tugs the bottom drawer open and pulls the notebooks she remembered yesterday evening out. “I found the previous gamekeepers’ diaries. It was apparently tradition to keep one.”

“Do any of them mention the Huge Chasm?” David asks eagerly, stepping up to her and looking over her shoulder.

“Not as such, no, but up until the mid-eighties, all of them talk about, like, weird things happening in the woods.” She glances up. “Almost like ghost stories. Legends.”

At this, Riley perks up. “I’ve got some local legends described at the museum. Do they refer to the hermit?”

“The – no, although that sounds like an interesting story.” She hands them one of the notebooks, spine cracked and pages yellowed. “I marked some pages. It’s mostly strange disappearances. Many pets, but people as well. And reports of odd noises in the forest, strange things happening. A lot of it is vague, but something _has_ happened here before.”

Riley has returned to their map and is pushing a new drawing pin into it, at the far western bend of Mate Street.

“What’s that?” David asks.

“The disappearance described in this—” they shake the notebook a little— “happened here, in 1967.”

All three of them look at the map wordlessly for a few seconds.

“Question,” David then says. “If we have to spend another afternoon staring at that bloody thing, can we take it outside?”

Angélique shares an amused look with Riley.

* * *

“Are you sure about this?” Liam asks.

“Do I _look_ like I’m sure?” Joshua snaps.

“Not really,” he concedes, hunching his shoulders and kicking the wheel of his motorcycle. Joshua sighs.

“You don’t have to come, I told you.”

“I _know_ , mate.”

They’re in front of the gravel path leading to a house off Mate Street – although they can’t actually see the house from here. The sloping garden is overgrown, looking more like a forest than anything else. It pains Joshua’s inner gardener to see the dead grass and the rampant weeds tangling through everything.

This is where Marcello’s cousins-of-sorts should live. Joshua is now sure he didn’t – _doesn’t_ – know about them, because he’d undoubtedly have mentioned.

When Joshua received no answer calling the other cousins, the ones from Canberra, he decided to come here, after Refik Adnan’s funeral. His sister needs space anyway, and maybe he does as well. That doesn’t explain why he texted Liam about his plan, let alone why he let the guy take him here on that bloody motorcycle again, but he’s trying not to think about those things too much. His mind is just addled because of everything that’s been going on.

“Well?” Liam asks. Joshua nods, and they start making their way to the house.

It’s small, weatherboard battered and beaten, but the windows are clean, and further down, some laundry is out to dry on the Hills Hoist. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a doorbell.

Liam shrugs and raps his knuckles against the front door instead, using the hand he didn’t punch Joshua with. Vaguely amused by that, Joshua quirks a smile in his direction until he frowns in confusion and he remembers what’s going on.

The door opens a tiny crack, and they both straighten when a man with dark hair peers through it. He doesn’t look like Joshua would imagine a cousin of Marcello’s would.

“Hello?” the man says.

“Hi,” Joshua replies, “we’re looking for Dragos or Luca.”

The man’s eyes narrow. He looks a few years older than Joshua’s brother, but his eyes are tired, more so than David’s ever get – and David’s been through a lot.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Joshua Clarke, this is Liam Jones. We’re – ah – friends of a cousin of theirs.”

“Dragos’s?” The door opens a tiny but more. “Jones as in—”

“Yeah,” Liam replies, sounding exasperated. He must get that a lot. Joshua does, too; David is a well-known figure around Watunga.

The man sighs. “Dragos is in. I’ll go get him.”

They shuffle awkwardly on the veranda while he goes back inside. Joshua is still wearing his good shoes, and this time Liam is the one in thongs.

After a minute, a different man appears in the door. If the previous one looks tired, _he_ looks positively gaunt, although his brown eyes are sharp as anything when they flit over the two of them. He doesn’t look like a Vargas either – he’s far too angular, with cheekbones that look like they could cut and a sharp arch to his eyebrows.

“Stefan says you’re looking for me?” he asks.

“Ah, yeah. Dragos?”

“At your service,” he jokes flatly, lisping around pointed canines. “You’re friends of Marcello’s?”

Joshua nods. “You’re his... Cousin, of sorts, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. Is he all right? Is his grandfather all right?”

Joshua glances at Liam, who’s pushed his sunglasses into his hair in an unexpected show of courtesy. Apparently, Dragos extrapolates something from that.

“What happened?” he asks, an anxious undertone in his hoarse voice.

“He’s— Marcello is missing.”

Dragos closes his eyes and releases his breath through his nose as he runs a hand over his jaw.

“Come in,” he says, and after sharing one more bewildered look, they follow the spindly man into the mess of the hallway.

* * *

Alex, who never seems to be talkative, is especially close-lipped about the ‘bad’ thing they say Refik got himself into. While he can understand not wanting to talk about something scary, Lars wishes they would. Maybe it would help. Maybe it would give him enough information to convince his brother and Ashleigh that he’s telling the truth about all of it, or even enough to rescue Refik, himself.

Now, however, Alex is just making flower crowns at the base of Peter’s tree in their kingdom while Lars has climbed into it. He swings his legs back and forth from a branch and smiles faintly when the rumbling noise from the mountains makes its return.

Some things, at least, don’t change. The noise has always been there. It’s like a strange neighbour. You’re never sure what he’s doing, but he’s always there.

“Lars?” Alex’s voice drifts thinly up to his branch, and he drops down one or two so he can look at them. Their eyes are wide with fear when they meet his.

“Hey, it’s nothing, Alex,” Lars says, letting himself drop to the ground, crouching next to them. They’re shaking, clutching their knees. “It’s just a noise, it’s not dangerous. I promise. It’s always been there.”

However, they don’t stop shaking, and all the flowers in the crown have wilted, framing their colourless face. Cautiously, Lars reaches out to them, touching their shoulder.

“Bad,” they say.

“It’s something the mountains do.”

“Lars, it’s _bad_ ,” they repeat. Lars sighs, furrowing his brow. It’s true that he really has no clue what the noise actually is, but it’s been there for as long as he can remember, and nothing about it has ever seemed _bad_ to him.

“You’re safe here,” he says, changing tack. “I promise you’re safe. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

He decides against trying to convince them to have an adult help again. They’ll get there. Alex nods slowly, not quite white-knuckling their own legs anymore, although their eyes are still fearful. The colour of their irises is odd, but very pretty as well.

Alex is rather pretty overall, Lars catches himself thinking, and he promptly flushes. Curiously, Alex tilts their head, a pale braid sliding across a shoulder.

“Why are you red?”

“Me? I’m not— I— That’s just my hair,” he tries to save. He likes his hair, really, even if being a redhead in this country’s climate has some huge disadvantages.

A faint smile appears on Alex’s face, and their eyes shimmer with amusement. Lars lets himself fall to his knees and buries his face in his hands.

“I like your hair,” Alex tells him – sincerely, judging by the look on their when he peeks through the gaps between his fingers.

“Thanks,” he mumbles. “I like your hair too.”

Alex smiles and touches his elbow.

* * *

_Dragos Rotaru’s_ house is, frankly speaking, a mess.

It’s not dirty, Joshua thinks – when he had a glance into the kitchen, that seemed passable – but there is a lot of _stuff_. The couch he and Liam are sitting on now was covered in books and, for some reason, VHS tapes, which Dragos all unceremoniously shoved aside.

The other man, introduced as just Stefan, asked if they wanted coffee, which they declined, and is now lurking in the shadows on the back veranda, smoking his third cigarette since he went out there. Joshua is morbidly impressed.

He also kind of wishes the residents of Watunga would invest in roomier seating, because he can feel every twitch of Liam’s body where it’s pressed against his own for the second time in as many days.

“And so,” the boy in question is finishing, “we went to see your grand-uncle, and he told us Marcello’s in Canberra, but no one’s answering Josh’s calls. Which brings us here.”

Joshua startles a bit at the use of _Josh_ , but files it away to maybe comment on later when Dragos sighs deeply and pushes his thin fingers into his equally thin hair.

“I haven’t seen my grand-uncle in a long time,” he says, eventually. “I always tried to keep an eye on Marcello after he came to live here, but it fell to the wayside a bit when— Stefan! Would you come in!”

Stefan obediently puts his cigarette out and wafts inside on a cloud of smoke, settling on the armrest of his – partner’s? – chair.

“Are you gonna cry?” he asks, and Dragos huffs.

“When have I ever _not_ – anyway, me and Stefan used to live a little more out of Watunga with Luca, my younger brother, up until a year ago. Until Luca went missing.”

Liam stiffens next to Joshua, and he barely restrains himself from grabbing on to some random part of him in response. He clasps his hands together instead.

“What – what happened?”

Dragos blinks fast, swallowing, and Stefan rests a hand on the base of his neck.

“He went to school here in Watunga, must have been a year or two above you two,” he explains, as his thumb gently strokes the side of Dragos’s neck. “Just... Didn’t come home one day. Then the same thing happened as to... Marcello?”

“Marcello, yes,” Joshua confirms. Evidently, Stefan was listening out there. “He said he’d run away.”

Stefan nods, sucking his cheeks in. “Dra went to look, because it’s completely unlike Luca to do anything like that, and it seemed his cousins had up and left the country altogether.”

“That’s terrible.”

Liam asks, “Are these the same cousins Marcello is supposed to be with?”

“I’d think so,” Dragos says. “No one would believe me. The goddamn cops thought I was crazy, and it’s just... God, I can’t believe it’s happened again.”

They’re all silent for a while. Joshua sits still with his fingers so tightly intertwined they’re starting to hurt, Liam wriggles restlessly, and Dragos leans into Stefan’s touch, still blinking away tears.

“Look,” he eventually says, tugging at his earlobe, “there’s something I can show you, but chances are you’re going to think I’m insane. Even Stefan does.”

Stefan opens his mouth and furrows his brow, but doesn’t deny it.

“Honestly, stranger things have probably happened lately,” Liam says. “We’re supposed to hate each other, you know.”

Joshua huffs, and Dragos and Stefan share a fond yet amused look that makes him want to migrate to the opposite end of the couch with the implications it holds. Instead, he glances at Liam, who quickly looks away in turn.

“Yeah, show us anyway,” Joshua says faintly, and Dragos nods, standing up to walk over to a desk by the window. Joshua is afraid he’s going to have to sort through the whole overflowing mess to find what he wants to show them and glances at his watch nervously. He has work in fifty minutes.

Luckily, Dragos only grabs a sheet of paper lying on top of a stack of vinyl records and comes back, spreading it out on the coffee table. A familiar pattern unfolds itself; a map of Watunga and its direct surroundings. There’s The Parade, there’s Mate Street, and somewhere there is where Liam lives.

“What’s this?” Liam asks. “I mean, it’s a map, but what are those markings?”

There are markings on the map, strange angular symbols in red pen on several places across the village and the woods, to about halfway between the edge of Watunga and Boundary Street. Dragos smooths his fingers over them, sighing.

“I won’t bore you with the whole story, but after we came to Watunga to try and investigate what happened to Luca ourselves, I started finding these symbols all throughout town. They’re not easy to spot, but I had nothing...” He looks up at Stefan, who smiles sadly. “I had nothing to go home for.”

“And you think these things have something to do with Luca disappearing?” Joshua asks, leaning forward to take a closer look. Liam breathes on his neck. He shivers.

“Honestly,” Dragos replies, “I don’t know. I have a feeling they do, but nothing factual to back it up. I know it sounds insane.”

“Still self-aware,” Stefan mumbles, and Dragos pushes at his leg affectionately.

Liam also leans forward, pressing his shoulder to Joshua’s and tilting his head back and forth. His hair brushes against Joshua’s ear.

“Can I take a picture of this?” he asks.

There is a sad sort of smile playing around Dragos’s lips when Joshua looks up at him, and his fingers are clenched in Stefan’s washed-out trousers.

“Take it,” he says. “I know the whole damn thing by heart, and it hasn’t brought Luca back.”

Liam looks at Joshua, who can only shrug helplessly even as he tries not to flinch at how close they are. Dragos is undoubtedly strange, quite possibly unbalanced by grief, but he’s trying, at least. Moreover, Stefan looks more than a little relieved at the mention of the map disappearing from his life.

“All right, then,” Liam says. He reaches for the map. “Do you want to know if we discover anything? Well, I guess if it’s to do with your brother, we ought to tell you anyway, yeah, but...”

He smiles faintly. “Feel free. I’ll give you my phone number. But take care of yourselves, all right?” Suddenly, he looks much older than he probably is, his eyes deep and shadowed.

“Yeah,” Liam says. He runs a hand though his hair – which is actually quite impressive, Joshua thinks. It seems as though it should be stiff with product.

His fingers twitch with curiosity, and could his mind just _stop_?

Everyone is standing up now, so Joshua does so as well. Ah, they’re leaving. Good, he’ll be on time for work.

He thanks Dragos and Stefan, and follows Liam to the veranda, and through the wild garden. Before the house becomes invisible altogether, they both turn back, and Liam makes a strangled noise when he sees Dragos and Stefan entwined in a desperate sort of kiss by their front door, Dragos’s arms looped tight around Stefan’s neck.

“Oh, fuck off,” Joshua mumbles.

“Fuck off what?” Liam asks, turning to him with a baffled expression. “Them? Because really—”

“Yeah, yeah, they’re gay.” He rolls his eyes. “You’re not subtle, Liam.”

“Me, not—” He sprints after Joshua when he legs it to the street. “What are you _talking_ about, mate?”

“Don’t—”

“Do you think I’m _homophobic_? Because I can’t even begin to tell you how fucking wrong you are. You’ve got a bloody strange image of me in your head, really.”

“I just—” Joshua tries to say, dumbstruck.

“Look,” Liam interrupts in a low voice, now leaning on the seat of his motorcycle with both hands, eyes hard, “I know I haven’t exactly Mr Fucking Perfect, but I have not once got into a fistfight the way you seem to think I have, and I have never in my bloody goddamn _life_ been homophobic, Joshua.”

He’s breathing hard now, some hair has fallen into his eyes and the muscles in his forearms are coiled with tension.

Joshua almost makes a joke, but when he opens his mouth, all that comes out is an apology. It’s true he doesn’t know Liam that well, when he gets down to it, but he never expected this to be such a sore point.

“Yeah, yeah,” Liam says. “Let’s go back. We can look at that map tomorrow, yeah.”

He thrusts his spare helmet at Joshua without looking his way, and Joshua wishes he could say why he feels so unsettled.

“See you tomorrow,” he calls when Liam has dropped him off at home. Liam looks at him for a long moment before flipping the visor of his helmet down, and doesn’t say anything.

* * *

All three of them are staring at the map, now pinned to the weatherboard on the outside of the gamekeeper’s cottage.

“I could... Check the police records,” David says dubiously. Riley makes a noncommittal noise, and Angélique shakes her head.

“We just have to accept that something weird is going on in Watunga,” she says.

On the map, the most striking feature is still Riley’s red-string depiction of the Huge Chasm, but the most _interesting_ thing is indicated by the drawing pins representing the occurrences described in the gamekeepers’ diaries. They are all spread out across the forest and the mountains west of the Chasm. Which, at the time, _did not exist_.

“Maybe it would be more useful to find someone who lived here at the time and ask them what they remember,” Riley says.

“If they wanted to talk about it, don’t you think we’d have heard, mate?” David retorts, and Riley sighs. “I think we should go and look at some of those places.”

“Dave, it’s been fifty years since some of those cases. I don’t think there’ll be bloody evidence left!”

“I _know_. I know, all right.”

Angélique bites her lip, then says, “We could do both, you know. Maybe someone will mention something the gamekeepers haven’t that could be helpful in knowing what to look for.”

David looks down at her and smiles, and Riley hums thoughtfully.

“I can talk to some people who helped me with the museum,” they say. “You two have work, but we could go into the woods tomorrow afternoon.”

“Sounds good. Hey, Angélique.” David turns a lopsided smirk on her, his green eyes twinkling with amusement. “I seem to have lost my phone number, care to give me yours?”

She has to laugh even as she programs it into his terribly old-fashioned phone, and tries to tell herself that line would _never_ have worked in any other situation. When she shares a look with Riley, the knowing spark in their hazel eyes confirms otherwise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ALSO FEATURING  
> Dragos Rotaru - Romania  
> Stefan Borisov - Bulgaria  
> Luca Rotaru - Moldova
> 
> not much really happens in this chapter but the Next One,,, hooo

**Author's Note:**

> Since this is set in Australia I tried to at least use Australian spelling, and as much Australian expressions/words for things as I could, especially in dialogue, but the fact remains English isn't my first language and even my normal writing style is all over the place in terms of language, so don't judge me too harshly :')
> 
> I did learn that Word always says I write words like 'traveller' wrong because the double L is British spelling! Apparently some things from high school English class did stick. I like the double L versions better...


End file.
